This all started with the video by Matt Parker from @standupmaths, and his video "I wired my tree with 500 LED lights and calculated their 3D coordinates".
This is my hack at it.
Ok so I'm using the same lights that Matt linked to in his video. (affiliate links because Amazon has a handy tool bar to make short URLs) https://amzn.to/3AcK3yj- ALITOVE WS2811 RGB LED Pixels Light Individually Addressable 12mm Diffused Digital Full Color LED
I already had a Rasbery Pi 3:
rwhiffen@raspberrypi:~/prog/XmasTreeLights $ more /sys/firmware/devicetree/base/model
Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Rev 1.2
rwhiffen@raspberrypi:~/prog/XmasTreeLights $
I boought this 10A 5v power supply that came up as a Products related to this item suggestion. https://amzn.to/3g0u67x - Aclorol 5V 10A 50W Power Supply 100V-240V AC to DC Adapter 5V 10 amp Switching Converter 5.5x2.1mm Plug for WS2811 WS2812B WS2813 5V LED Strip Pixel Lights
The other stuff I had lying around from other projects, like gator clips with breadboard pins etc.
Here's a bunch of links that taught me how to do this. Sites that I mimiced the results of may be a better description.
- The Adafruit Raspberry Pi NeoPixel tutorial - using the Using External Power Source Without Level Shifting config
- Adafruit again - how to set up Python for NeoPixels on a Pi
- MIT's GSD6338 github XmasTree project
- There were a bunch of other pages I referenced while trying to debug what was going wrong with my setup. If I find them in my history I'll put them here also.
This did not start out well. Initially I couldn't get the pixes to light up correctly.
First - most the LEDs wouldn't light up. Second the colors were off and they'd flicker and blink oddly. I had also incorrectly wired the pins at some point - now I'm not sure if I fried something. I'll write up more in a blog post but basically I had to switch to GPIO 21 -** pixel_pin = board.D21**