How to connect LED lights for 3D Printed Robot

Question

I'm new here and a newbie in electronics. I have a project to create a 3d printed robot with lights. I came across neopixels led's and the ardruino microcontrollers recently and find it to be a great possible sollution for what I need.

For my project, the 3d printed toy will have several parts that would need lights and I plan to use roughly over 40 LEDs connected to one source. I' m thinking of using the WS2812B LEDs.

I plan to use one neopixel ring for the robot's chest similar to Iron-Man's arch reactor.. While the head head will have 2x LEDs for the eyes, a smaller neopixel ring for the headpiece, another 2x LEDs for on the side of the robot mouth and 3x LEDs inside each vents on both sides of the robots head.

I need all the LEDs to turn on with a white light with a switch and turn red with another button. Although, I'd still be happy if they can only work with white.

For the power source, I was thinking about using a small powerbank or 2x 18650 batteries as the power source.

As mentioned, I'm very new to electronics and based on my research so far, i get confused really fast from all the jargons used and I'm not sure how to proceed.

Hopefully, i can get some answers here.

So.... My question is, is it possible to connect all the LEDs i plan to use on one microcontroller (ie: Ardruino Uno or Nano)

Most of the examples I can see on youtube are projects using LED strips. Are they diffrences in the way they are connected?

Another problem is coding for the ardruino..i'm totally clueless.

Any suggestions or help would be very much appreciated.

Answer 1

The key point for WS2812B LEDs is, that they can be daisy chained. This means, that everyone of them has one data input and 1 data output. If you connect the data output of one LED to the data input of the other, you created a short strip with 2 LEDs. Doing this multiple times creates a bigger LED strip. It's not relevant, if the LEDs are arranged into a physical strip, or arranged into complex forms. The LEDs are addressed by their position in the strip. The microcontroller sends a data stream to the first LED. It will read the first 3 bytes (1 byte per color) and forward the rest of the stream to it's data output, so to the next LED.

So you can wire all the LEDs on your robot in a way, that you basically only have 1 LED strip. In this case you only need 1 pin on your Arduino (plus Vcc and ground of course).

Or, if it's to cumbersome to wire all LEDs together, you can make multiple strips, divided by zones on your robot (like 1 strip for the face, 1 strip for the chest, ...). Every strip will need it's own pin on the Arduino.

Which way you go is your decision and also depends on how many pins you have free.

My question is, is it possible to connect all the LEDs i plan to use on one microcontroller (ie: Ardruino Uno or Nano)

Yes, one microcontroller is plenty enough for this. As I wrote, for 1 strip you only need 1 data pin.

Most of the examples I can see on youtube are projects using LED strips. Are they diffrences in the way they are connected?

This depends on what strips they have. If they use WS2812B strips, it is all the same. As said, the physical arrangement of the LEDs doesn't matter. But there are also other types of strips, for example the not-individually-addressable-single-color types, or the not-individually-addressable-RGB types (which often have one PWM line per color).

Another problem is coding for the ardruino..i'm totally clueless.

Have a look at the Adafruit Neopixel library or the FastLED library (both on github). They are libraries, that will hide most of the complexity from you and will make it easy to control the LEDs. They both have examples, that you can use to get started. Adafruit also has good tutorials for this. You can google them.

For the power source, I was thinking about using a small powerbank or 2x 18650 batteries as the power source.

I don't know, how much current these batteries can give you. I will leave that to you for your research. But be sure, that you can always provide the needed current. One WS2812B LED can draw up to 60mA (20mA per color), if you set them to full brightness white. So 40 WS2812B LEDs, can draw up to 2.4A. I guess, that your robot also has motors, which can also draw a big amount of current. So keep the total current draw in mind and don't ever try to draw this current through the Arduino (since this might fry the voltage regulator).