LED Ring with or without drivers

General
1

Hey guys, this might be a little bit out of your knowledge, but I accidentally ordered a 24 RGBW LED without integrated drivers. The LED ring I was using before was 24 RGB LED with drivers. Does anyone know what I need to do or program to make the RGBW without driver ring work?

Thank you.

2

That would just be regular GRBW LEDs then, and should be treated as such I suppose: https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-arduino-lesson-3-rgb-leds/overview

3

Hi,

What are you hoping your LED ring will be able to do?

You mentioned your first ring had intergrated drivers, which suggests that you can control each led on the ring individually, or what had generaly become know as ‘neopixels’.

Your description of without intergrated drivers suggest as Moors reasonably assumed were tri/quad colour leds, mounted as a ring, which means you can only adjust the colours and brightness of the whole ring at a time. But lifes rarely that straight forward. Can you forward links of the leds ring you did use, and the link of the led ring you now have…

But as a whole the adafruit website has lots and lots of stuff on working with loads of different led combinations and well worth looking through… I even go back and referance it even now, just to make sure I don’t mess up ideas I’m playing with but might have done variations on a dozen times.

Liam

1 Like
4

Hey Liam,

Here are the two I used:
With drivers: https://www.adafruit.com/product/1586
Without drivers: https://www.adafruit.com/product/2862

I am trying to control each LED individually (neopixel) as well as controlling them to change any specific colour I want.

Thank you.

5

Wait… I almost didn’t catch the difference in the 2 product links you posted. Both are neopixel rings… which means they both have integrated drivers. The difference is that the first ring only has RGB pixels but the second link has RGBW pixels. The “W” means it has an additional LED on the die that outputs a white color (instead of using RGB color mixing to approximate white.) Take a look at this snippet from the Adafruit NeoPixel Uber Guide:

image
image791×299 17.4 KB

7

Hi AcidAce,

Ninjatill’s responce was spot on and well worth checking out. But don’t forget to make sure that you declare 24 pixels.

If your still not getting anywere, double check your connections, particularly the data pin used, and if still no joy, post your code

Liam

8

Hey Liam,

Thank you for your help and clarification. I will try it out as soon as I can.

Thank you.