So I have LED's wired in parallel that I'm using with the knock sensor tutorial code to turn on and off LED's when noise is detected. (for the curious, a demo is here: - YouTube).
I've soldered the LEDs to wires and basically plan on putting it all together in a helmet for my halloween costume.
While I can wire them up in parallel on the breadboard, I'll admit I'm stumped as to how to do that on a PC board or via wiring. I've never used PC board before for soldering so I don't really know where to start there.
Is there a type of PC board for this type of thing? Should I just wrap the positive ends of all the wires together and then solder that to another wire that will become my positive lead? Also: do I need to add resistors to each and every wire? I've heard that LED's in parallel should have resistors for EACH LED in the circuit.
It is recommended to have one resistor per LED, so a standard protoboard is enough. You will need to add some driver depending on the number of leds you are going to use.
I'm using 12 total LEDs, and while I have a driver lying around, it seems kind of overkill to try using it as all I'm doing is turning on/off current to all 12 LEDs, not trying to do anything fancy with each individually. I'm also trying to have this project wrapped up by Friday so I can take it to an event in NYC on Saturday, so simple = better.
You can wire one resistor + led to each digital port 0 to 11. In AVR you can turn one complete port (8-bits) at once but I don't know if that is possible in Arduino... I think DigitalWrite activates one individual port at a time. You can try adding 12 consecutive DigitalWrite calls or within a for loop and see if there is any delay in the lighting sequence... it may even create some interesting effect if you do it from the center of the 12 leds to the edge, or from the edge to the center...
I could definitely do some nifty tricks if I did it that way ... something to think about. I still need to figure out what I'm doing when I wire up the eyes, as I figured I'd be doing something interesting there as well.
I'd still need to connect all the negative leads together though, wouldn't I? So I'm kind of back to square one: how the heck do I turn 12 wires into 1?
Again: I've never soldered PC board before so I'm not sure what I'm doing, but I'd assume I could use the center lines on one of these to create electrically common elements?
Ok so googling "soldering PC boards" does not yield anywhere near the wealth of insight that googling "soldering perfboard" does. Good to know. I think I might have this figured out.
Again: I've never soldered PC board before so I'm not sure what I'm doing, but I'd assume I could use the center lines on one of these to create electrically common elements?
Yep. Its just a breadboard with solder basically.
If your not wanting individual control of the LEDs then all you'd really need is the appropriate transistor attached to a digital output to turn them on and off.
