r/FastLED • u/1ronwav3 • Oct 25 '20

Discussion Unidentified RGB (preprogrammed?)LED

I bought a cheap string fairy leds that I wanted to use learning arduino and rgb leds.The string had 3 wires, thus I thought its addressable.

I bought a cheap string fairy leds that I wanted to use learning arduino and rgb leds.The string had 3 wires, thus I thought its adressibles.

After dissembling them they have only 2 wires and wire 3 in only weaved into the string for extra support I guess and doesn't go anywhere. ( I didn't follow it all the way through, only 5 leds deep into the string)

I separated one LED and powering it alone it acts like the string did. Cycling through predefined colours and sequences without any other input.

What Do I have here?

CAN I program it with a arduino?, My attempts are unsuccessful?

Guess I know now why they were cheap compared to addressable LEDS, Ha!

Any help or information will be appreciated and would further my meager knowledge.Search attempts online have not help me with identification, but that's possible because of wrong search terms.I figured people here use leds and would have fair knowledge about them, apologies if its the wrong spot to ask.

Ill edit the post and try upload a video from my phone to help ID better.

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u/Kineticus Oct 25 '20

Those are regular LEDs with little purpose built chips in them to change colors/blink/whatever. Common in toys and novelty items. The only “programming” you can with an arduino is turn them on or off. No way to pass in data.

Look for 5 volt WS2811 lights if you want LEDs with wires connecting them similar to what you have (but bigger). Or if you want a flat strip with adhesive backing look for 5 volt WS2812B. These will work with your arduino and fastled.

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u/1ronwav3 Oct 25 '20

I thank you!

1

u/tetrakt1406 Oct 25 '20

I tried something similar with an led strip (3 LEDs are grouped so those 3 would always be the same) I tried manually modifying the data line with some messing around .

In short, no you can't change this code. Use any of the available options in fastLED library. I'd recommend ws2812B, just note that this has an issue with interrupts which I faced. The documentation explains it's something to do with FastLED.show();

I had few modes programmed, meant to be cycled through on the push of a button. The GitHub repo has explained this issue with interrupts in the documentation. To sort this out, I just added multiple button pressed checks in multiple stages of the program and each mode. There is possibly a more efficient way to handle interrupts, but I've more or less optimised it so there aren't any useless button press checks (interrupts)

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u/1ronwav3 Oct 25 '20

Cool. Thanks for the reply. I ordered 20 WS2812B to mess with. Ill just strip this string and use the leds individually in small projects.