Friday, September 11, 2020

72 x 40 WS2812B Addressable LED sign with Arduino Uno and Bluetooth

 I am making the biggest LED sign yet.  It is 4 feet wide by 2 feet tall.  It will feature 72 x 40 Addressable LED's.  That is a total of 2880 LED's.  This picture shows the big sign next to one of my standard 16 x 72 LED signs.


Since the LED strips are actually made up of sections that are 1/2 meter long they need to be soldered to get 4 feet.  That takes two 1/2 meter, 30 LED lengths and then 12 additional LED's.


Here is a big picture of the sign being made.

The LED panel has all of its LEDs in place now.

They have 40 connectors now on the back side.  The LED strips come with shorter wires to the connectors and the connectors I buy come with longer wires.

I need to make wire harnesses to connect to all of the connectors.  The harnesses are made in groups of 8 for the 8 data lines from the Arduino.

It is up and running!  Now to work on the software.  This is a close up so you can see the five 5 volt 10 amp power supplies.  A 12 volt 16 amp 200 watt power supply runs the sign.

This is the new processor assembly.  It is simpler than using an entire Arduino Uno, it is a Nano instead.

Here is the first picture of the big sign working.  The text is being cut off for some reason.




2 comments:

Thomas Collins said...

Hi Bob , with 40 pins to drive in parrallel are you intending to use an Arduino Mega or some other controller?

Bob Davis said...

I will use 8 pins, or maybe 12, and then wrap the far end of each row back around to the next lines. But maybe someday I will look into using a Mega so each line can be independent.