From bigclivedotcom.
Although this unit has been cost cut to the edge in terms of its controller, it would be the ideal base for a custom RGB control project. It has a spiral with 36 WS2812B style LEDs in it.
If using with a different controller, make sure you double check the wire colours. In mine, red was +5V, white was 0V and black was data!
As supplied it comes with a very basic controller that seems to be bit-bashing (literally toggling a bit in software) to create a very crude approximation for the data stream required to send data to WS2812B style addressable LEDs.
A test with other strings of addressable LEDs showed that they have pushed the timing to the edge to the point that some LEDs struggled to handle the rogue timing and glitched randomly. It is possible that the strings I tested it with were over-sensitive to the timing.
Because of the way the data is transferred along a string of LEDs one at a time, if there is an excessive delay between each RGB set then it’s possible for one or more previous LEDs in the string to decide that the current stream of data has ended and to dump their data out to their LED chips and then wait for a new stream. That means that LEDs beyond that point may never receive data, or may end up glitching or have stuck-data – since future updates may not reach them.
The ideal setup for controlling these addressable LEDs is a dedicated serial module in a microcontroller that churns out data from an area of memory continuously at the perfect rate.
In this case they have squeezed surprising functionality out of a cheap microcontroller running on an internal oscillator, and just squeezing the timing tolerance of the LEDs to the every edge to allow a bit of processing between each burst of data. Not an easy feat with WS2812B style LEDs as they command a very high data speed with very little leeway. The bit that’s causing the issue here is the tolerance of the "end of stream" timer in the LEDs.
It’s impressive that they have managed to achieve what they have in the software. It’s also possible that they have chosen batches of the LEDs with a slower internal oscillator to widen the timing tolerance to make it work.
Once again, this light came from AliExpress (not a sponsor):-
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007552112385.html
Note that the listing is for a few styles and both plain white and RGB.
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