Thanks for coming to my blog! I’m pretty sure you’re going to find this to be the most boring thing ever.
One of last years’ projects was a 46′ tall antenna “wayfinder” that we used to find our camp from miles away. Here’s what it looked like:
It was awesome, but next year I want it to be even awesomer.
The antenna was an off-the-shelf military style field antenna, able to be set up by two soldiers in half an hour assuming that those two soldiers had eight friends and had previously spent an entire weekend in the backyard figuring out how to set it up.
We zip-tied LED strips to the antenna on four sides. Each side consisted of three 5-meter strips at a density of 30 pixels per meter, so there were 450 pixels on each side or 1800 pixels total. (Each pixel is 3 LEDs so I’m calling this 5400 LEDs).
It looked OK, but it wasn’t quite bright enough for my taste. Next year I want to double the number of pixels. And it wasn’t quite fast enough. The maximum frame rate I could get was 18Hz, and if I have to double the number of pixels, that would reduce the frame rate to 9Hz.
(The WS2812B protocol just uses a single wire for the data. You send it a high voltage followed by a low voltage; if the high voltage duration is longer, it’s interpreted as a 1 bit. That requires about 1.25μs per bit. With 8-bit color and three colors (RGB), you need 24 x 1.25μs, or 30μs per pixel, so a single update of my 1800 pixels took 54ms which meant I could get a maximum frame rate of 18fps. Not super fast. If I wanted to make a bouncing thing that bounced up and down the pole on one second intervals, it basically had to jump 25 pixels every frame, “ew David.”)
Thus, my first priority this year is figuring out how to make it faster.
I’m going to investigate two different approaches to making it faster, and blog about it as I go along. The first approach is switching to an APA102C-style LED. This chip can be sent data much, much more quickly at the cost of having an extra conductor for a clock, so you need four wires instead of three.
(Plot twist: the actual LED strips I used last year were WS2815s, a variant which also uses four wires. Instead of a clock, the extra wire is for redundancy and makes it so that if any single LED dies, the whole strip doesn’t die. That seemed important in the desert. In practice, I had two occasions where two pixels in a row died and killed the whole strip, and no occasions where one pixel died and was successfully routed-around. That thing in the desert does not want you to have an easy time. ALSO, another reason I liked the WS2815 is that it uses 12 volts instead of 5 volts, so the voltage doesn’t drop nearly as much over long runs. In short, the APA102C would solve one problem and create two more.)
The other approach is to stick with the WS2815 LEDs, but break up the whole antenna into shorter segments with maybe a few hundred pixels each, so that data can be crammed into each of the LED strips in parallel.
Here are some parts that I have on order as a part of this experiment.
- WS2815 strips. This is what I used last year.
- APA102C strips, for comparison.
- The Teensy 3.2 OctoWS2811 adapter. This is advertised as a way to drive up to 4,416 pixels at 60 Hz.
- New controllers, to replace the Cortex M4’s I have been using: I ordered a Teensy 3.2, a 3.6, and a 4.0, as well as some ESP 32 controllers.
I’m also keen to try Yves Bazin’s experiment. He’s using shift registers to drive 100 separate LED strips in parallel from a single ESP32 controller. My goal in life is to be as cool as Yves.
When these parts come in I’ll set up some experiments and write some reviews. In the meantime, if you have any suggestions or advice, I’d love to hear it; please email me because I am too old for social media.