Turning a Christmas tree into a low resolution display using WS2812B

What it does

We made use of a Pi zero as a controller for the WS2812B LED strips. 15 metres (3 rolls) of these strips were wrapped around a tree. We made use of a logic level converter to convert the 3.3V output from a Pi to 5V. We made use of this excellent library https://github.com/jgarff/rpi_ws281x to actually drive the WS2812B LEDs, specifically the provided Python API. We wanted each light to pulse out an ID, to enable us to locate the (x,y) coordinates of each LED. To accomplish this we used a simple digital format. We make use of the following data format for the data the LEDs pulse out. We use 16 bits for the preamble, 10 bits for the ID, and 8 bits for the checksum (which is CRC % 256). We…from anfractuosity.com

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