Published August 19, 2016

NeoPixel LEDs: Arduino Basics

Light up your world with these programmable fountains of photons!

BeginnerProtip1 hour135,790

Things used in this project

Hardware components

Arduino 101

An Uno or other board will do just as well.

Adafruit NeoPixel strips

Resistor 10k ohm

Capacitor 1000 µF

Breadboard (generic)

Jumper wires (generic)

Hand tools and fabrication machines

Hardware 101 HW101 Marker

Story

Media-center lighting, high-viz vehicles, text and image displays – NeoPixels are a beautiful and versatile way to add programmable RGB LEDs to your project. They come in rings, sticks, strips, matrices, and more.

Each pixel is made up of several separate colored diodes: RGB, or RGBW if there's a pure-white channel. And each RGB "pixel" has its own little controller chip. If you just hook up the power, nothing will happen – you have to send data over a PWM pin to make these live.

Here's a quick guide to setting them up with Arduino!

THE CIRCUIT

For this tutorial, we'll assume that you're working with LED strips – the simplest way to light up your bike, bar, CPU tower, and so forth.

You can cut the strips to any length you like; to do so, make sure you cut across the center of the oblong copper pads. That leaves you with solderable pads on each end, which will allow you to chain them together after the fact.

Solder some male-male headers to the end, with the little arrows on the LED strip pointing away. The arrows should point away from your headers. Put your headers behind the arrows. (It helps to chant this in your head, if you're doing lots of them...)

Note: Depending on where you buy your "NeoPixels", you may end up with something that has the pins in a different arrangement. Pay attention to the labels, as well as the schematic :)

THE CODE

Go download Adafruit's NeoPixel library to get started. You can just download the .zip file with the library, unzip it on your computer, and drag the contents into your Arduino libraries folder. (The "libraries" folder is usually created in the same "Arduino" folder where you save your sketches. If you don't have one yet, go ahead and create it.) Also, restart the Arduino IDE if you already had it open.

Once it's up again, you'll have some new example sketches. Let's take a look!

File > Examples > Adafruit NeoPixel > simple

This guy will light up your LEDs green, one at a time. How does it work? We're gonna use another for loop! (Here's our first intro to these.)

As we saw before, for loops are useful for nudging a number higher. We can use that to modify each LED in a sequence – or every other LED, or whatever you like.

So, first, we tell the sketch to include Adafruit's library.

Then, we define two variables: the data pin we're using (any PWM pin), and the number of pixels in the strip.

In the next bit, we initialize the strip as a new object, pixels . (You can call it whatever you want, of course.)

Then, we set a delay value, which will be used later to pause after lighting up each LED.

There's a little bit of board-specific code in the setup code, and then we tell the NeoPixel library to start communicating with this strip.

Loop time!

We've got another for loop, which is kicked off when the variable i is equal to 0.

Note that this is actually where we're defining the variable, as well – so it starts as 0. You can tell because of the int marker, and also because there's only a single = sign. (One = sets the first thing equivalent to the second, as in i = 0 ; two == checks to see whether the two sides are equivalent.)

So, this for loop says:

If i is 0 when you hit this block of code (and it is), then as long as i is less than the declared number of pixels, bump it up by 1...

then, set the color of the first pixel in the pixels strand to green...

then, actually push that color to the pixel...

then, wait 500ms (from the delayval setting)...

and repeat for each successive pixel, until you max out the strand.

It's a simple but fun animation. :)

Hit upload and deploy this code to your strand.

Next steps

Read through the Best Practices guide. If you want to hook up your Pixels to a beefy power source, remember to add a capacitor across the power leads!

Check out some of the other example code. The strandtest example sketch includes a bunch more animations, to help you get a feel for it.

Then, try coding your own! I'm working on a Matrix-style set of strips for my bike.

You can also fancy it up with a NeoPixel ring or matrix.

Adapt this

You can transfer this to a smaller circuit (I recommend the ATtiny) to easily hide the controls.

Build an infinity mirror with some half-silvered acrylic or glass!

See the whole series of Hackster 101 tutorials on Hackster and YouTube

Code

Arduino example sketch: "simple"

// NeoPixel Ring simple sketch (c) 2013 Shae Erisson
// released under the GPLv3 license to match the rest of the AdaFruit NeoPixel library

#include <Adafruit_NeoPixel.h>
#ifdef __AVR__
  #include <avr/power.h>
#endif

// Which pin on the Arduino is connected to the NeoPixels?
// On a Trinket or Gemma we suggest changing this to 1
#define PIN            6

// How many NeoPixels are attached to the Arduino?
#define NUMPIXELS      16

// When we setup the NeoPixel library, we tell it how many pixels, and which pin to use to send signals.
// Note that for older NeoPixel strips you might need to change the third parameter--see the strandtest
// example for more information on possible values.
Adafruit_NeoPixel pixels = Adafruit_NeoPixel(NUMPIXELS, PIN, NEO_GRB + NEO_KHZ800);

int delayval = 500; // delay for half a second

void setup() {
  // This is for Trinket 5V 16MHz, you can remove these three lines if you are not using a Trinket
#if defined (__AVR_ATtiny85__)
  if (F_CPU == 16000000) clock_prescale_set(clock_div_1);
#endif
  // End of trinket special code

  pixels.begin(); // This initializes the NeoPixel library.
}

void loop() {

  // For a set of NeoPixels the first NeoPixel is 0, second is 1, all the way up to the count of pixels minus one.

  for(int i=0;i<NUMPIXELS;i++){

    // pixels.Color takes RGB values, from 0,0,0 up to 255,255,255
    pixels.setPixelColor(i, pixels.Color(0,150,0)); // Moderately bright green color.

    pixels.show(); // This sends the updated pixel color to the hardware.

    delay(delayval); // Delay for a period of time (in milliseconds).

  }
}

Credits

Alex Glow

145 projects • 1570 followers

The Hackster team's resident Hardware Nerd. I love robots, music, EEG, wearables, and languages. FIRST Robotics kid.

NeoPixel LEDs: Arduino Basics

Things used in this project

Hardware components

Hand tools and fabrication machines

Story

THE CIRCUIT

THE CODE

Next steps

Adapt this

Schematics

NeoPixel programming circuit

Code

Arduino example sketch: "simple"

Credits

Alex Glow

Comments

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NeoPixel LEDs: Arduino Basics

NeoPixel LEDs: Arduino Basics

Things used in this project

Hardware components

Hand tools and fabrication machines

Story

THE CIRCUIT

THE CODE

Next steps

Adapt this

Schematics

NeoPixel programming circuit

Code

Arduino example sketch: "simple"

Credits

Alex Glow

Comments

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