RE: Outside LED lighting recommendations?

["Paul Gale" <groups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Following Franks's suggestion, I emailed a guy in the US who's built an RGB
controller board. Looks really excellent. Here's his reply (published with
permission):

Howdy Paul,

The board I created is designed to offload the work of controlling RGB
(full
color) LEDs.  It allows the LED to be set to any color over a serial link
(SPI or RS232) using a very simple command protocol.

It also lets you define simple color animations for the board to manage
(like "slowly wash from red to green over 2 minutes" or
"pulse the LED between red and green ever 3/10ths of a second"). 
This takes a lot of work of any controller.

The boards also support storing the LED configuration to FLASH and using
those settings as power up defaults.  This allows you to load a series of
color or animations in and disconnect the unit OR have the unit come up in
a useful/interesting state until you send commands to it.

Each board can control from 1 to 13 RGB LEDs.  Each LED can be set to one
of 16. million colors (basically, 24 bit color, 8 bits RED, 8 bits GREEN, 8
bits BLUE).  When not using all the possible LEDs for a board, you can omit
components (board has been designed to not break without
"optional"
components.  The boards have uniquely addressable IDs, meaning you can hang
several boards off the same communication wire and still command them
individually.  Using the 254 command addresses and 13 LEDs per board, you
can have 3,302 RGB LEDs controlled by a single communication wire.

The board is driven by a PIC 16LF87 processor and a series of Maxim 6966
PWM drivers.

You can download the firmware to program the PIC chip (both C source code
and the "hex" file (if you only want to program the chip, you
only need the hex file).  You can also download the schematic and board
designs that can be then sent to a board fabricator to create.  My boards
didn't cost more than about $7 each to create (well worth the money vs hand
wiring this thing).

Anyway, that's the thumbnail.  Since I've got this running, I'm adding
color stuff to more than I expected in the house.  I've added colored
buttons to my MAME arcade cabinet, have my garden lights now settable to
any color or wash and am adding full color accent lighting to my screening
room.

You can read more about this and download all the materials at:

http://www.cdp1802.org/RGBLED

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask.

Gerry



I may well price up the components and look at getting a few boards made.
What do you think?

Paul.



> -----Original Message-----
> From: ukha_d@xxxxxxx [mailto:ukha_d@xxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
> Benfield, John (Penta)
> Sent: 01 August 2005 14:38
> To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
> Subject: RE: [ukha_d] Outside LED lighting recommendations?
>
> >So anyone seen any 'commercial', dimmable, colour controllable LED
> lighting fixtures - there must be some out there...???
>
> Try http://www.acdclighting.co.uk/,
They do dimmable & colour changing &
> external LED lighting, however not sure of the combinations.
>
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> Yahoo! Groups Links
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