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LEDWiz, basic LED and RGB LED questions
unclet:
So if I wanted to connect 3 LED lights to "one" port on the LEDWiz, then does "in parallel" mean that I would have 3 wires going into that one port on the LEDWiz? A diagram might help ..... I would hate to wire this wrong incorrectly.
headkaze:
I think the best solution for having RGB LED's dance to music for your Jukebox would be to get a thin sheet of ply, drill some holes in it to fit a bunch of RGB-Drives in a uniform pattern. You could have several RGB-Drives connected to the same 3 outputs so you could in fact fill a rather large sheet of ply using one LEDWiz.
So basically say you want to have 4 RGB-Drives connected to one output you put all 4 Red wires to Port 1, all 4 Green wires to Port 2, and all 4 Blue wires to Port 3 of the LEDWiz. Then just continue on to Port 4, 5 and 6 for the next 4 RGB-Drives.
Then get a plastic light diffuser to cover the sheet so the light from the LED's is diffused.
Next you get the LuminAudio Engine software and/or the scripts for FE integration so that you can simply run an exe to launch the different types of effects. You would also need to modify a PC power cable to run directly off PC's 5V power supply as the USB connection would not be sufficient to run them all.
An added bonus of going this way is not only could you have LED's "dance to music" but you could also run lwa's (LEDWiz Animation files) which will allow you have complex antimations of LED's changing color or flashing on and off in different patterns. Another cool effect is one I designed called the "Plasma effect" which has grandients of color moving around. It's one of my favourite effects using the LEDWiz, you can check out a (rather poor) video of it at the bottom of this page. Although the video doesn't show the 12 odd color patterns it can produce, it might give you the basic idea of the effect.
The only problem is the LuminAudio software is still a bit limited at the moment, but I think if it was expaned to play back random lwa's, have the plasma effect (which I could possibly help out with), and the "dance to music" all randomly changing (to music!) you would have a pretty awesome addition to a jukebox ;)
bfauska:
This is the basic idea between parallel and series. The + and - are for illustrative purposes only, I don't actually remember which side of the LED is which right now. The way the electricity in the system behaves is quite different depending on which way you do it. Parallel allows each component in the chain to get full power and series divides the power between each part of the chain. It is actually quite complex compared to that description, but that's the simplified version.
EDIT: I looked at a few sights and it appears that I actually correctly drew the positive and negative. This is one site I found]=http://www.quickar.com/ledbasics.htm]This is one site I found that at, and it does some in depth coverage of LED wiring.
bfauska:
This is actually also parallel, while it looks different it is basically doing the exact same thing as the other parallel.
unclet:
Excellent .... thanks for taking the time. This helps alot.