Each Octolively module is 4 X 8 inches (10.16 X 20.32 cm) in size, and features eight huge (10 mm) ultrabright LEDs, spaced along a two-inch grid. Each Octolively module also has eight infrared proximity sensors– one for every LED –to detect nearby motion, even in total darkness. The modules can be tiled edge-to-edge, seamlessly, in any size or shape of rectangular array. You can cover a full wall, or just make a long strip as narrow as 4 or 8 inches wide.
Octolively modules come pre-programmed with eight different effects that respond to motion and gradually fade back to idle when there is no motion– ideal for making interactive LED walls, bar tops, and coffee tables. You can switch between the different effects with a button press: Gently fading trails after your motion, a “heat” mode that gets brighter as it detects more motion, simple positive and negative “shadow” effects that light the LEDs– or darken them –wherever you touch, ripple, sparkle, and a “melting” mode where activated pixels fade only very slowly.
Each Octolively module is controlled by an on-board microcontroller and functions as a self-contained, stand-alone device. You do need to provide power (5 V DC), but no central computer nor complex communication wiring is needed. Because it’s self contained, there is no trade-off between array size and performance.
Octolively is a fully open source hardware+software design, designed to be hackable.
Each Octolively module is 4 X 8 inches (10.16 X 20.32 cm) in size, and features eight huge (10 mm) ultrabright LEDs, spaced along a two-inch grid. Each Octolively module also has eight infrared proximity sensors– one for every LED –to detect nearby motion, even in total darkness. The modules can be tiled edge-to-edge, seamlessly, in any size or shape of rectangular array. You can cover a full wall, or just make a long strip as narrow as 4 or 8 inches wide.
Octolively modules come pre-programmed with eight different effects that respond to motion and gradually fade back to idle when there is no motion– ideal for making interactive LED walls, bar tops, and coffee tables. You can switch between the different effects with a button press: Gently fading trails after your motion, a “heat” mode that gets brighter as it detects more motion, simple positive and negative “shadow” effects that light the LEDs– or darken them –wherever you touch, ripple, sparkle, and a “melting” mode where activated pixels fade only very slowly.
Each Octolively module is controlled by an on-board microcontroller and functions as a self-contained, stand-alone device. You do need to provide power (5 V DC), but no central computer nor complex communication wiring is needed. Because it’s self contained, there is no trade-off between array size and performance.
Octolively is a fully open source hardware+software design, designed to be hackable.
A few weeks back I had an idea to build an LED meter to display our Splunk license usage at work. Splunk is an application we use to collect and monitor logs all across our systems. I currently have a web dashboard that will tell me what our license usage is. A normal day follows a relatively standard license usage pattern. It generally rises at a certain rate and hits a certain log volume by the end of the day. If the log volume is higher or lower than usual, it is a basic signal that something may be wrong on the network. The problem with the web dashboard is that I have to remember to open that tab and refresh it every so often in order to keep tabs on it. I figured if I could just have an LED bar on the side of my monitor keeping tabs on the license usage for me, my brain would naturally get used to daily patterns and be able to notice subconsciously when something is wrong. Last night was our open house night at Eugene Maker Space and I finally had some time to start working on this project.
BACK INS STOCK – Monochrome 128×64 OLED graphic display! These displays are small, only about 1″ diameter, but very readable due to the high contrast of an OLED display. This display is made of 128×64 individual white OLED pixels, each one is turned on or off by the controller chip. Because the display makes its own light, no backlight is required. This reduces the power required to run the OLED and is why the display has such high contrast; we really like this miniature display for its crispness!
The driver chip, SSD1306 can communicate in multiple ways including I2C, SPI and 8-bit parallel. We prefer SPI since its the most flexible and uses a small number of I/O pins so our example code and wiring diagram will use that.
The OLED and driver require a 3.3V power supply and 3.3V logic levels for communication. The power requirements depend a little on how much of the display is lit but on average the display uses about 20mA from the 3.3V supply. Built into the OLED driver is a simple switch-cap charge pump that turns 3.3v-5v into a high voltage drive for the OLEDs. You can run the entire display off of one 3.3V supply or use 3.3V for the chip power and up to 4.5V for the OLED charge pump or 3.3V for the chip power and a 7-9V supply directly into the OLED high voltage pin.
You’ll need a level shifter to communicate with this OLED using a 5V microcontroller such as an Arduino, but we include a DIP level shifter chip!
You can download our SSD1306 OLED display Arduino library from github which comes with example code. The library can print text, bitmaps, pixels, rectangles, circles and lines. It uses 1K of RAM since it needs to buffer the entire display but its very fast! The code is simple to adapt to any other microcontroller.
…Later in the day, I attended the talk Passing Time With SPI Framebuffer Driver given by Matt Porter, who now works for Texas Instruments. His talk was feedback from real-life experience developing a driver for a SPI framebuffer controller. Initially, the problem was that a customer had started developing a driver, but that driver violated all the Linux development rules: no usage of the GPIO APIs, no usage of the SPI infrastructure, no usage of the device model, everything was done through a basic character driver directly manipulating the hardware registers.
…the kernel detects thanks to page faults when a portion of this memory has been changed, and calls the framebuffer driver so that the driver has an opportunity to push these changes over SPI to the framebuffer controller. Of course, this mechanism run at a configurable frequency. The device that was used by Matt Porter was a 1.8 screen available from Ada Fruit, this might also been a good device to use in our future kernel courses, to let participants exercise with driver development.
With this in mind, we wanted to make it easier for people to get these LCD into their projects so we devised a shield that lets you control a 16×2 Character LCD, up to 3 backlight pins AND 5 keypad pins using only the two I2C pins on the Arduino! The best part is you don’t really lose those two pins either, since you can stick i2c-based sensors, RTCs, etc and have them share the I2C bus. This is a super slick way to add a display without all the wiring hassle.
This shield is perfect for when you want to build a stand-alone project with its own user interface. The 4 directional buttons plus select button allows basic control without having to attach a bulky computer.
The shield is designed for ‘classic’ Arduinos such as the Uno, Duemilanove, Diecimilla, etc. It will also work perfectly with Arduino Mega R3′s. Earlier Mega’s have the I2C pins in a different location and will require you to solder two wires from the I2C pins on the shield and plug them into the different I2C locations at Digital 20 & 21.
At this time, the library and shield can control the RGB backlight of our character LCDs by turning each LED on or off. This means you can display the following colors: Red, Yellow, Green, Teal, Blue, Violet, White and all off. There is no support for PWM control of the backlight at this time, so if you need to have more granular control of the RGB backlight to display a larger range of colors, this shield can’t do that (the I2C expander does not have PWM output).
Just wanted to share the Valentine’s Day heart light I completed for a client, using the addressable RGB LED strips from Adafruit. The blog post contains a few photos, a demo video, and a quick overview of the design process.
Hi, I made a method to update LPD8806 strips about 5x faster than the current library on GitHub. It’s about the same speed as the hardware SPI implementation, but can be used when those pins are dedicated to other hardware (e.g., Ethernet boards).
It requires that the clock and data pin assignments are known at sketch.
If you’re using LPD8806 LED strips and you can’t use the hardware SPI port (e.g., when using an Ethernet board), there are two other options in the Adafruit library: the default mode and ‘slowmo’ mode. The default mode is decent, but the flexibility of being able to choose the pins at runtime comes with a cost. However, you can still get a decent speedup by defining your pin usage at compile time in a replacement show() function.
This tutorial is interesting because its the first time we’ve seen the use of compile-time templates to set interface pins via a sketch. Traditionally, Arduino users use digitalWrite() or digitalRead() to interface with the pin registers. Hardk0re hackers sometimes like to use pointers to the registers which still allows for flexible pin numbering in the sketch but this technique takes it to the next level!
Digital Addressable RGB LED with PWM waterproof flexi strip. These LED strips are fun and glowy. There are 32 RGB LEDs per meter, and you can control each LED individually! Yes, that’s right, this is the digitally-addressable type of LED strip. You can set the color of each LED’s red, green and blue component with 7-bit PWM precision (so 21-bit color per pixel). The LEDs are controlled by shift-registers that are chained up down the strip so you can shorten or lengthen the strip. Only 2 digital output pins are required to send data down. The PWM is built into each chip so once you set the color you can stop talking to the strip and it will continue to PWM all the LEDs for you
Built in 1.2 MHz high speed 7-bit PWM for each channel – that means it can do 21-bit color per LED (way more than the eye can easily discern). Once you set the brightness level for the LEDs, your microcontroller can go off and do other things, no need to continuously update it, or clock it. The best part is that compared to the WS2801 which can only run one LED at a time, this chip can drive 2 RGB LEDs which means the price stays the same as the older HL1606 strip, nice!
The strip is made of flexible PCB material, and comes with a waterproof sheathing.
You can cut this stuff pretty easily with wire cutters, there are cut-lines every 2.5″/6.2cm (2 LEDs each). Solder to the 0.1″ copper pads and you’re good to go. Of course, you can also connect strips together to make them longer, just watch how much current you need! We have a 5V/2A supply that should be able to drive 1 or more meters (depending on use)
They come in 5 meter reels with a 4-pin JST SM connector on each end, and are sold by the meter! If you buy 5m at a time, you’ll get full reels. If you buy less than 5m, you’ll get a single strip, but it will be a cut piece from a reel which may or may not have a connector on it.
Adafruit SSD1306 running at over 500 hz frame rate. Greg writes -
Final driver tweeks have raised the frame rate to over 500 hz with the same graphic load. Again, a great display! Thanks very much for your products. They are fun to incorporate into our designs.
The display is being updated at over 500 hz as can be determined by the on screen counter (it counts from o through 999 then resets) and by the oscilloscope frequency display (it is reading 553.1 hz). The driver is optimized for the display, however, it is ready to drive the 128 by 64 version of the display when it becomes available. The PIC24FJ64GB002 is running at 16mhz. The spi bit rate is 8mhz. The drivers are written in C. No assembly language was required.
Monochrome 128×32 OLED graphic display. These displays are small, only about 1″ diagonal, but very readable due to the high contrast of an OLED display. This display is made of 128×32 individual white OLED pixels, each one is turned on or off by the controller chip. Because the display makes its own light, no backlight is required. This reduces the power required to run the OLED and is why the display has such high contrast; we really like this miniature display for its crispness!
The driver chip SSD1306, communicates via SPI only. 4 or 5 pins are required to communicate with the chip in the OLED display.
The OLED and driver require a 3.3V power supply and 3.3V logic levels for communication. To make it easier for our customers to use, we’ve added a 3.3v regulator and level shifter on board! This makes it compatible with any 5V microcontroller, such as the Arduino.
The power requirements depend a little on how much of the display is lit but on average the display uses about 20mA from the 3.3V supply. Built into the OLED driver is a simple switch-cap charge pump that turns 3.3v-5v into a high voltage drive for the OLEDs, making it one of the easiest ways to get an OLED into your project!
You can download our SSD1306 OLED display Arduino library from github which comes with example code. The library can print text, bitmaps, pixels, rectangles, circles and lines. It uses 512 bytes of RAM since it needs to buffer the entire display but its very fast! The code is simple to adapt to any other microcontroller.
Our offices have these little peek-a-boo sections in the frosted glass. Some people stick post-it notes up describing what’s going on with them, but I wanted something more complex. I had recently picked up the Adafruit “RGB backlight negative LCD” display and was evaluating the X-Bee radios and decided to make an “almost wireless” LCD display for the front of my office. It’s not very complex – using a Boarduino (Arduino) running a little sketch that has a few modes – static text, alternating text describing what I’m working on, plus a mode that cycles through a bunch of “Burma Shave” four-liners just for silliness. The modes and backlight color are controlled from my PC via the other X-Bee. People seem to like it, so I’ll probably commit it to a perf-board and get rid of all those ugly wires.
RGB backlight positive LCD 20×4 + extras [black on RGB]. To match our popular 16×2 RGB Character LCDs (http://www.adafruit.com/products/399 & http://www.adafruit.com/products/398) we’ve now added 20×4 LCDs! Get more text, with an RGB backlight. Both positive and negative type! This is a fancy upgrade to standard 20×4 LCDs, instead of just having blue and white, or red and black, this LCD has black characters on a full color RGB background! That means you can change the display background color to anything you want – red, green, blue, pink, white, purple yellow, teal, salmon, chartreuse. This LCD looks strikingly good in person. This LCD is the most daylight readable character LCD we have and is very beautiful and easy to read no matter what color/brightness you have for the backlight.
One nice thing about these LCDs is that they are an elegant upgrade, but you can use them in existing LCD projects and they’ll still work – just that only the red LED will be used (so it will appear black-on-red). The extra two pins (17 and 18) are for the green and blue LEDs. The LCD has resistors on board already so that you can drive it with 5V logic and the current draw will be ~40mA per LED (there are two LEDs, 20mA each). There’s a single LED backlight for the entire display, the image above showing 3 colors at once is a composite!
Comes with a single 20×4 RGB backlight LCD, 10K necessary contrast potentiometer and strip of header. Our tutorials and diagrams will have you up and running in no time!
I wanted to share a quick project using one of the adafruit RGB LCDs. It’s an ambient temperature display — it displays the current temperature and will adjust the LCD backlight color depending on where it falls. It’s a really simple project — just wire up the LCD and a temperature sensor. There’s more info, a video, and the source code here. thanks!
RGB backlight positive LCD 16×2 + extras, black on RGB. This is a fancy upgrade to standard 16×2 LCDs, instead of just having blue and white, or red and black, this LCD has black characters on a full color RGB-backlight background! That means you can change the background color to anything you want – red, green, blue, pink, white, purple yellow, teal, salmon, chartreuse, or just leave it off for a neutral background. This LCD is the most daylight readable character LCD we have.
We had these custom made to our specification so that you can use them in existing LCD projects and they’ll still work – just that only the red LED will be used. The extra two pins (17 and 18) are for the green and blue LEDs. The LCD has resistors on board already so that you can drive it with 5V logic and the current draw will be ~20mA per LED. There’s a single LED backlight for the entire display, the image above showing 3 colors at once is a composite!
Comes with a single 16×2 RGB backlight LCD, 10K necessary contrast potentiometer and strip of header. Our tutorials and diagrams will have you up and running in no time!
The interactive LED thing I showed last week on the Show & Tell was a shown at TEDxMaui on sunday…. yeah I was up till 2am working on code. The blog post is pretty thin on tech for the build but the flickr set shows the parts and some detail. When I recover from the build up to TEDx I’ll do a better writeup… then again, I need to enter a new build mode to get the weather proof, improved interaction version built for Source Maui – our local burning man inspired event. That one requires 15 meters of tape, more/better interactivity and waterproofing. Probably battery power too. Thanks for great work and inspiration adafruit!
NEW PRODUCT – 36mm Square 12V Digital RGB LED Pixels (Strand of 20) [WS2801]. RGB Pixels are digitally-controllable lights you can set to any color, or animate. Each metal ‘pixel square’ contains 4 RGB LEDs and a controller chip soldered to a PCB. The pixel is then ‘flooded’ with epoxy to make it waterproof. These are fairly large pixels but they have a lot of nice mounting options, such as two metal flanges on the side and a 0.15″/4mm diameter hole in the middle so you can screw them directly onto a surface. They’re typically used to make outdoor signs. Compared to our other LED dots, these are much bigger and much brighter, good for larger scale installations.
The pixels are connected by a 4-conductor cable. +12VDC, ground, data and clock. Data is shifted down from one pixel to the next so that you can easily cut the strand or attach more onto the end.
Each dot is digitally controlled, with an internal 8-bit PWM LED driver (24-bit color for 16 million different shades). The pixels must be clocked by a microcontroller, we have an example code linked below that works on an Arduino, it should be simple to adapt it to any other microcontroller.
The pixels use 4 x 5050 RGB LEDs, with a 120 degree beam width. The total max brightness of all LEDs is about 6000mcd. (Please note: mcd ratings of LEDs are notoriously inflated by most LED sellers, so be extra-skeptical when reviewing LED ratings!)
Sold by the strand, each strand has 20 pixels in series! Each strand has two JST SM 3-pin connectors so you can connect multiple strands in a row, as many as you wish, just watch for how much current they want. The two power wires are brought out separately to make wiring easier, a 2.1mm terminal block adapter is handy here to attach a DC power supply. We have a 12V/5A supply that should be able to drive 2 or more strands (depending on current use). The LEDs are constant-current driven so you’ll have even colors through-out the strand as long as you have a stable 12V supply
NEW PRODUCT – SMT Cool White 5050 LED – 10 pack [6500-7000K]. These surface-mount LEDs are an easy way to add a lot of bright white dots to your project. They’re similar to the ones in our digital RGB LED strip, same size and shape, but do not have red/green/blue LED chips inside. Instead, there are 3 ultra bright cool white (6500-7000K) LEDs. They are half a centimeter on a side, which makes them small but not so small that they are impossible to hand solder. The LED is insanely bright, at a eyeball-blistering 20 Lumens (~6000mcd with 120 degree beam width).
Comes in a strip of 10 pieces. If you order more than one strip, it will come as multiple strips of 10, not one long strip.
They’re fairly bright LEDs, we guess its something around 1000 mcd total. They do diffuse nicely so you can the color changing from any angle. The forward voltage of the whole LED is about 3.4VDC but you can drive them from a lithium coin cell like a CR2032 and they’ll just be a little dimmer. We don’t have a datasheet showing the current draw over different voltages and colors but at the ‘rated’ 3.4V its approx 20 mA and at 3.0V its approx 10mA.
5mm diffused RGB LED
Two leads
Power with 3-3.4VDC
Current draw: 10-20mA depending on voltage and displayed color
Comes in a pack of 10 LEDs! Although the LEDs are all the same shape and have the same basic program, due to manufacturing variables they will not sync together – they’ll slowly drift in and out of sync.
Printable catalog (PDF)
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