Adafruit LED Ring

Germain · November 2017

Hello,

I'm trying to use an Adafruit 12 LED NeoPixel ring (LED Ring)) connected to GPIO but I have some difficulties to drive it on the UP Board.

I found a GITHUB project (Drunkar/NeoPixel-edison-mraa) that able to drive it on an edison card under ubilinux using mraaa library, so I tested it on the Up Board, but I can't set colors correctly, and animations are broken.

I guess there is a problem with WS2812 LED coding and data transfer time, but I don't know how to resolve it...

Could you help me please?

Nicola Lunghi · November 2017

Hi
have a look here
https://github.com/emutex/Adafruit_Python_GPIO
Regards
Nicola Lunghi

Nicola Lunghi · November 2017

Hi
the neopixel required a strict GPIO timing so its very difficult to use it from an up board.
read here
https://wp.josh.com/2014/05/13/ws2812-neopixels-are-not-so-finicky-once-you-get-to-know-them/
It could be better to use led driver that use I2C or SPI as control interfaces.
Regards
Nicola Lunghi

npurtschert · May 2018

Hi
but there is this library in node-red for the raspberry-pi which uses PWM to control the LEDs:
https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-node-pi-neopixel
With this library the WS2812 LEDs are working fine.
Now I am using an UP squared box with linux to control a strip of 8 WS2812 LEDs without any I2C or SPI interface and I am not having success on using the libraries mentioned above.

Would you please help me?

JaneDo · November 2018

Hello,
@npurtschert , I also try to control a strip LEDs (ws2811) with the upsquared, and I don't manage to use neoPixel.
I work on Ubuntu 16.
Did you, or anyone, find a solution ?

Otherwise, how could I use I2C or SPI protocol to control this strip ? All of this is new to me...

Thank you,

nukular · November 2018

I have never used these LEDs on a Pi or an UP board, so I can't give you a solution, but generally speaking, you will have to look at the libraries for the Pi and modify them to correctly use the PWM on the UP2.

You can't use I2C or SPI to control WS2811/2812B LEDs. As Nicola Lunghi said, they require rather specific timing to work properly. Here is an interesting post about that:
https://cpldcpu.wordpress.com/2014/01/14/light_ws2812-library-v2-0-part-i-understanding-the-ws2812/

Overall it is not that easy to use these LEDs on the UP2, I would suggest you get a different LED strip instead that uses either WS2801, APA102 or LDP8806 LEDs. These have 2 inputs: Data and Clock. They are much easier to control because they don't require a specific timing on the data pin that is hard to achieve for a board running Linux.

noobie · September 2021

Hi from 2021!
Did you complete this project? If so; can you explain it in detail and share some code examples with the up2 connections and everything, please? I have done so many things with these rings on Arduino but I have no idea how to do it on up board and there isn't any source about it at all, so I'm stuck.

Here is my question related to this problem:

https://forum.up-community.org/discussion/4753/wcmcu2812b-ws2812b-neopixel-leds-on-up2-board#latest

Adafruit LED Ring

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