0000 0000 0010 0001

WS2811 string of LEDs

I have bought a few strings of LEDs for various purposes (some as yet undiscovered I suspect), but my latest favourite are strings of 50 individually addressable WS2811 12mm LEDs.

Lovely and relatively robust as well

With power coming in separately for greater current draw

There are a few ways of driving these guys, for example with a dedicated RGB controller, but I chose to use an Arduino Nano with a separate 5V power supply, and code based on the marvelous FastLed library.

If you squint you can see the chip inside!

There are a number of great demos that come with the package as well as some excellent code available on the interwebs. I grabbed a few likely ones and cobbled them together in this sketch. The lights arrived post Christmas this year, but the plan is to dive deep into the example code and come up with a suitably festive light show for this year.

For the moment, here is the demo code in action (with some thought provoking (?) background music)...