Category Archives: Uncategorized

So, you’ve got yourself a reel of those gorgeous new pebble lights. I don’t blame you! They are gorgeous. Coated in silicon, they are impervious to water and dust, nicely diffuse, and very flexible, so they can safely be used in costumes and stuff that will flex a lot. Each pebble is an individually-addressible 5VContinue reading “Soldering pebble lights”

One of the biggest hassles with addressable LED strip installations is that you usually end up running data and power separately. Sure, in theory, a Neopixel type installation just needs three conductors – one for data, one for ground, and one for +5V or +12V. In practice this doesn’t work on large installations for twoContinue reading “Single Cat-6 Power and Data for WS2815 LED strips”

Updated 20 April, 2024 Got a Teensy 4.1? Want to use it with FastLED? You’ve come to the right place. The Teensy 4.1 is an incredibly powerful microcontroller at a very reasonable price, and FastLED is still one of the best libraries for driving WS2812 type addressable LEDs from microcontrollers. Paul Stoffregen, creator of Teensy,Continue reading “Using Teensy 4.0 or 4.1 With FastLED”

For the future Turtle Antenna, I’m using 16 of these “flex led” strips. Each strip is 5 meters of WS2815 in a nice IP68 frosty silicone sleeve which creates beautiful, diffuse pastel colors. They are 60 pixels per meter so I’m using a total of 4800 LEDs. If you asked me a year ago IContinue reading “Teensy 4.1 is Amazing”

I have been experimenting with various ways to build power injection cables for long runs of LEDs that will be outdoors in suboptimal conditions. Here’s what I came up with, all using parts easily procured from Amazon. This is the power supply I chose. I like it because it is already reasonably weatherproof. I haveContinue reading “Power Injection”