The NEW Kind of LED You Should Know About!
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- Опубликовано: 12 ноя 2022
- Dave takes you on a tour from the first LEDs to the latest in LED technology, the individually addressable LEDs such as Neopixels/WS2812B style. From the quantum effects to how to wire their data line, Dave covers it all! For my book "Secrets of the Autistic Millionaire": amzn.to/3diQILq
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Video credits: 500Hz PWM flicker by Mogan Feldon, • PWM LED flickering at ... 
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OK, OK... you're right. WS2812B is not "new" in that it's been around since 2013, but it's "new" to most hobbyists, as evidenced by the responses below. But a small and dedicated group of hobbyists has indeed been using them for a number of years, so they're not "new" in that sense.
We have far more concerning problems that are not being stopped nor prevented! You people and the majority are not suceeding in findinding and/or figuring out a means to get out of the the insanity that continues. You people and the majority are still participating in and perpetuating and unsafe and harmful way of life, instead of doing something increasingly less harmful, that's actually reasonable, and is actually smart. Hypocritically speaking, because I don't know of any other way while being tortured, stop messing around, stop acting like you're not a part of the problem; stop bullying and participating in and perpetuating authoritarianism, corruption, and profiteering. Realize how messed up you, you people, and the majority are, become far more reasonable and smart, and stop harming innocent and helpless children!
Yeah, you're the new one. I clicked expecting something beyond my huge pile of strips, arrays and pixels, rendering them obsolete. I agree about the library though. FastLED is great.
Nicola Tesla also helped with the first light bulb. And his even lasted longer than the Edison. And Edison said everybody should have DC current. I thought this was about grow lights LOL
I’m very much an amateur hobbyist but been building RC airplanes and drones for a long time and been throwing on addressable LED’s for years. I do appreciate any video on the subject but lots of us amateurs have been doing this for years. And I program them! Amazon has had lots where no programming necessary for quite a long time. Heck, my “ARGB” keyboard is now several years old. It’s not about the info which is great, it’s about how “new” it is.
I did ambiligt with WS2812b
And Arduino in 2016
A code on the pc sampled screen colors.
And send I over usb
The best explanation of electroluminescence ever: "when an electron has to jump the gap from one semiconductor substrate to another, it gets so scared that it poops out a little photon of light."
Probably. But it ate my attention span, so i will never(or at least not soon) find out, which type of led he is actually hyping here.
At least i have the search term of programmable led, for the funny curtain, i am about to purchase. Maybe now i take another model.
Is the phton poop the reason why lamp covers turn yellow/foggy over time?
@@swedishpsychopath8795 Nope. It happens, because the queue to the toilets becoming longer and longer.
Also the silicone cover/mask/whatever it is good for, is becoming brittle and cracked. This sprays the poop everywhere.
Btw. White Leds turn blue, because the phosphorescent layer brakes down, due to the silicone decaying, exposing it to air.
Weird, I always thought it was because the jump gave the electrons motion sickness and they puked photons.
@@j3ffn4v4rr0 an expelled photon is an expelled photon either way. I suppose it could come out of either end, depending on the strength of the electron's constitution and it wouldn't matter. But in all cases, the electron will either be scared or sickened.
Your videos got me started playing with fastLED.... now all my GrandChildren have a unique LED lamp from GrandPa! Thank you Dave!
That is awesome!
@@DavesGarage which languages do you speak?
you should look into wled
@@DavesGarage dave I became homeless cause inflation. what should I do
@@mats520 English, and a very little bit of French and Spanish. (very small)
Honestly, the best intro to LED history and basic tech I've seen.
Worth mentioning: LEDs aren’t linear in their output relative to the average input current. (e.g. 80% PWM duty cycle isn’t necessarily twice as bright as 40%- it’s more an exponential curve) Maybe some libraries include the correction now, but if you’re starting from scratch or just not using a library that includes it, read up on gamma correction for RGB LEDs!
Do you have any idea how they determine what power of red light might be as "bright" as a given power of blue or green light? Is it by voltage, power, luminosity - how do you compare two different colors of light for equal intensity?
According to google: it's not that the LEDs don't produce 2x the light for 2x the duty cycle, it's that human vision is logarithmic, so twice the brightness can look dimmer than it "ought to". A subtle, but potentially important distinction.
@@Erhannis it’s really related to the drive current (and die temperature)- PWM just being an approximation for the average current over time. It’s particularly pronounced with high power LEDs, but even low power ones still have a noticeable non-linear output in response to input current. Look at the datasheet for a Kingbright AAAF5051-05 and you’ll see that their luminous intensity is normalized at 150mA- but to achieve 50% brightness you only need 40% power. Something like a Cree XP-E LED has “100%” output at 350mA, but in order to double the luminous flux you need to drive it at 850mA (~240%) and not 700mA. You’re right about human visual perception being non-linear for different color ratios as well- and different LED colors have different efficiencies too. RGB LEDs often help compensate for that by having different sized dies for each color in the package to help normalize the output per color.
@@ClayCowgill PWM would only be equivalent to average current if the output were linear with respect to current - which, you've pointed out, it is not. An LED at 80% PWM is not, exactly, getting twice the current of one at 40% - it's getting the same amount, for twice as long. So (averaged over time) it ouputs twice as much light. I concede that heat could have an effect, though I'd be surprised it the result were very significant for ordinary currents.
@@Erhannis but PWM isn’t necessarily “1’s and 0’s” at the load- depending on the driver characteristics and capacitance on the load(s) the PWM ‘output’ as seen by the LED can be a ramp and not a square wave. Then factor in how its being driven (high side or low side), how hard/fast the switch (transistor/FET/whatever) is turning on/off (and any capacitance on the drive input- like an RC on the gate of a high current FET and the switching time vs. PWM frequency) and then any current limiting during switching (due to transistor characteristics/saturation/input capacitance, etc.) and it gets pretty non-linear. With higher current drivers you’ll often see “no light” at all from low % duty cycle PWM drive values even though the switched LED current might be an amp or two. So- swirl that all together and that’s why we have color calibration and correction. 😆
Great explanation! I had no idea blue LEDs didn't come out until 1993! You can see the taillight flicker on some dashcams even today. I'll tell you, the best thing I was ever a part of was switching all the indicator lights at a water treatment plant to LEDs, every valve for every filter (3 filters) had 2 lights (incandescent). It seemed like we would change a few lights weekly. Swapped to LEDs, of course the cost upfront was more but we never changed a lightbulb again! Good stuff!
Is nice documentary about blue on youtube.
the blue led... i remember the rumors about blaupunkt car radios having a blue led, and i wanted one, went to our good old mp electronic store... yeah, the could have ordered one for .... 30 dm or so... i was young and could not pay :D now we get blueish leds everywhere and .... i dont like them any more, lmao. :D
There was led screens availbe at the time with red, green and sometimes colored LED to try to make them blueish. Today I wonder what they did to make the picture become more visible when they lacked blue.
@@tbgelectr0 not sure _D but ... there were green leds, so maybe used an filter foil or similar
I didn't realise they came out so early. In about 1996, I knew they existed, but they were really expensive - like maybe £6 for a blue LED vs £0.05 for a red or green one.
I was in college getting a degree in Lasers in the late 1980s when CD players got cheap enough for college students to afford them. My friends asked me how the CDs worked. I told them how a laser was focused on to the disc and it had shinny and dull spots and blah blah blah. I then said a disc could hold more music if they used a blue laser. No one believed me, even after I explained my reasoning. I had no idea that blue would be such a big deal that it would earn a Nobel Prize.
(For anyone else who reads the comment above.) What I find fascinating is that there’s no difference in reflectivity of the pits and lands. The reduction in amplitude of the pits is because the depth of the pits is exactly 1/4 the wavelength of the laser color, so that the 1/4 on the way in, and 1/4 on the way out, add up to 1/2, exactly 180 degrees out of phase, causing destructive interference of the incoming laser light!
@@tookitogo For pressed CDs. CD-Rs use color-changing dyes instead and this is why compatibility with players is a bit less than perfect.
@@eDoc2020 Yup. (Though given that I actually know the real physics of how pressed discs work, not just the “pits and lands reflect differently”, I’d think one would assume that I also know how CD-R works… ;) ) Bear in mind that I didn’t bother to specify “pressed discs” because it was a story from the 80s, when CD-R didn’t exist yet in any relevant fashion.
Shuji Nakamura actually performed over 1500 experiments to perfect the MOCVD process for efficient blue LEDs. Now that's patience.
If I had a time machine one of the things I'd do is go back to just after lasers were successfully produced and bring the inventors back to the present time and show them all the ways their idea changed the way we live. Of course after I had my fun I'd have to wiper their memories and return them.
Always, we enjoy clarity of content, and your video leaves us gasping at how well you impart detailed technical information.
You have such a way Dave that I believe I could just listen to you talk about and explain practically anything :)
A friend of mine runs an EMC test lab. He’s analysed a number of large products that use lots of these addressable LEDs. He’s found them to generate a lot of EMI as each LED serial output has a very fast rising edge and when combined with the delay across each LED, this can create a cascade of noise at the serial data rate. (And harmonics there of). So, if anyone plans to design a product with these, you may wish to consider adding some circuit elements to reduce the edge rate.
Power supply/decoupling caps at the actual LED and at _both_ ends of the strand, twisted pair wire to replace both power and signal wires, maybe some shielding foil wrapped around the wires, in the most (definitely) extreme case maybe even termination resistors.
@@absalomdraconis the main thing is to reduce the edge rate. Either add series resistance or shunt capacitance to the data output line. I guess a ferrite could also work.
@@alexscarbro796 Man, in a lot of cases, you don't have access to the data lines between pixels. Just between segments, of arbitrary length of tape or whatever form they come in.
As they say, everyone builds antennas. Either intentionally, or unintentionally.
Interesting because these led strips are everywhere. I wonder just how much noise is detected. The serial data has to be pretty low current. Maybe the switching of the LEDs is much higher. 🙂
Would reducing the slew rate at the controller side affect subsequent LEDs? The datasheet says it regenerates the signal (as it must) so I'd expect it to increase it at every LED up to the maximum it can do.
I've only ever coded very small, basic projects and have only done things with electronics a couple times, but just this video has made me feel like with a bit of confidence and the willingness to read some documentation, I could totally do some interesting things with LEDs. I'm on the train with the rest of the folks asking for a 101 series on this topic!
Thank you so much, Dude.
Really glad I landed on this page.
Happy 2023.
As a kid, I was always fascinated by indicator lights, especially blinking LEDs. Any device that contained an LED was practically like my pet. I still love LEDs even four decades later.
As a kid, I would pick junk off the side of the road and from dumpsters, just to swipe all the "free LED lights". The biggest rewards were old LCD clocks, with the expensive "digits". A few cash-registers were golden for LEDs, at the time. There would be several dozen of them, in red, green and yellow. I never found bi-color LEDs, that I was aware of.
I also pulled as many capacitors and resistors and chips as I could, from anything found. Never did anything with all that garbage though. I was a kid, it was fun to do. The internet wasn't born yet.
Thanks for the video. I didn't know the history of the FastLED library despite having used it for years. I appreciate it even more now. Great to hear there's more NightDriver coming! Really want to get into that.
Great video and good background info. I've been a huge fan of LEDs since the 1970s and also couldn't wait until someone came up with a blue LED. And the 528-ish nanometer green was also a great improvement over the 570-ish ones.. I thought I knew a lot about LEDs, but I never knew that the electrons got scared and pooped photons at the junction. You learn something new every day. Now I'll never be able to think of the LEDs without thinking an image of electrons pooping.. Genius explanation.
That is AMAZING, postage stamp size computer, and speck size led chip!
Takes me back half a century to memories of when I was excited to buy my own Tri Color LED, I thought that was amazing.
Thanks for sharing.
Damn man… this is the kind of delivery of information I’m looking for! Fast, succinct and humorous. Sub in under 2min for real. Keep it up!
A great LED history lesson, thanks Dave. I've done a few LED projects with ESP8266 boards and FastLED but I'm keen to have a go at something using Night Driver. I actually found your channel from looking for projects using LED strips and I think the parasol video was the first video of yours I watched, and I've been hooked ever since. The way addressable LEDS work is so simple I would never have worked it out. Looking forward to part 2!
Another great video! I can imagine you spend most of a day creating the animations, collecting shots, narrating and editing each video. I'm a dedicated subscriber to your channel! You manage to make every video entertaining without being too intrusive with animations and camera movements. Please keep up the great work! P.S. Have you thought of doing some project videos explaining each of your projects for those that wish to copy them?
You are such a great teacher of what you know and it's really easy to listen to you explain very complex topics. Great job as always.
Wow, thank you! I appreciate that!
Nice explanation of electroluminescence! Also @4:50 while PWM is the easiest way in digital circuits, the traditional way of controlling LED brightness is through regulating the current through the LED. Current, not voltage as the actual voltage varies little and follows from the characteristic of the LED when varying current.
LEDs may be thermally efficient, but if you're generating a lot of light, they' still need a decent heat sink/dissipator,
Yes, they still make more heat than light, it's just that since you're getting so much more light per watt of power, you run them at much lower power so they will be much cooler.
Yeah.. like normally using a high power on a small surface will resolve it into the component getting hot… that is not even led specific..
Yup! And unlike other high-powered lighting technologies like halide HID lamps, LEDs have a much lower maximum operating temperature. Ironically, most LED fixtures have more cooling components than their older, less efficient counterparts.
oh yeah
as someone who built a led COB growlight with 8x citizen clu048 1212 modules, passively cooled through them being mounted on a 50x50cm aluminum plate, i can concur
@@chasemartin4450 this isn't a huge problem for those high bay cobs though, they can reach up to 120 degrees celcius before quitting, most pedestrian leds die of thermal runaway @ 50 c lol
that's partially why i chose the cob solution, they are quite rugged comparatively
but yeah, they won't run at 400+ degrees celcius like HPS or HID does
they problem with them though is, they won't run without being that hot internally in the first place, and they are extremely shock sensitive as a result, with leds you can ram things against the wall and they'll not pop the lamps in any way.
Another GREAT Dave video!!! You're method of presentation is so well-tuned, and so easy to follow, I love it! I keep mentioning you to everyone I work with and all tech friends I meet up with.
Thanks for THIS particular video and calling out Adafruit--good company! Their new "feathers" have made my projects so much better. The item you mentioned being one of them. Those screens rock!
And then there is STEMMA... :)
Wow, thanks!
And they (Adafruit) are nice people running a great company, making many of the products in New York.
This is awesome. Thanks for showing the simplicity of the system and explaining why it works.
I remember my first red LED as a kid in the late 60's. I hooked it up to an old 9V battery and it went for months. When the greens came out I was jonesing for it until radio shack carried it (in Canada) that took a long time as I was pretty much an adult by then. LED's have come such a long way since then, it's impressive. Still love to use them whenever there's a good excuse. WS2812's rule when using them in a console for illumination, just waiting for them to come out inside of 6x6 pushbutton switches. ;)
I'm excited to see you doing more LED videos! I wish I had even a quarter of your knowledge on coding. I've had WS2812Bs on my roofline for over a year now and have just been using WLED to run them because of my lack of coding knowledge to effectively use FastLED. I've learned a little from watching your channel but would like to learn more. So you think you could maybe do a 101 series on coding in FastLED! THANKS! Love your channel!
Have you tried WLED and then use Jinx! to control them? U can make effects in Jinx its pretty easy and saves coding
@@jamesw5584 I haven't heard of Jinx. Where do I find some info on it?
WLED does use the FastLED library via wa2812FX…. I believe? Might be able to start simple with coding your own effects to add to WLED, 😊
@@maaronsmith U can type "WLED Jinx LED " in yt, i just checked u can still download it too. theres a few tutorials on yt but its pretty simple compared to coding it and is more dynamic. hardest bit is setting up the leds in jinx but if ur not using a matrix then it should be straightforward.
@@BRUXXUS Yeah WLED does use the FastLED library for the effects, but you can change the effects with the GUI instead of editing code
As a double "E" somewhere on the spectrum with a similar sense of humor, I enjoyed your video as it was well made, but especially because of the deadpan nods to the words that make just about any 12 year old chuckle. The photon poop is a visual that I think everyone trying to understand how LEDs works needs!
Good job. Lots of info, very thorough, and thank you for sharing!
Thank you Dave! You have a way of explaining things that make it easy, I really appreciate that!
Absolutely brilliant. It's one thing to know and understand the tech, but it is quite another thing entirely to be able to explain it in a customized format to an audience so efficiently and effectively. To be able to pass on knowledge and ability to others is a rare gift. Well done. Thank you.
How I taught electricity, electronics and semiconductor physics in my USAF tech school. (30650). Relate the theoretical to common physical mechanisms - such as water or oil flowing through pipes and all the plumbing components of a water treatment plant or refinery. KUDOs Dave!
He is a master communicator.
Probably Alien technology
Great video, and these little LED strips are fantastically useful. It's incredible they are able to miniaturize and integrate a whole serial chain of microcontroller-embedded RGB LEDs like this and sell them for these kinds of prices, but that's what living in the future is like.
A couple additional notes that some viewers might find interesting or useful:
While LEDs basically never have their brightness controlled by varying voltage, PWM (while a good strategy) is not the only way to do it. Constant-current power supplies (that can be varied to control brightness) are available as well, with the advantages being zero flicker whatsoever and somewhat better efficiency. This mostly comes up in LED *lighting* applications as the circuitry is more complicated and they operate in environments where the power efficiency and true no-flicker aspects are beneficial, so PWM is almost always what's used for lower-power indicator and effect LED applications like this.
Depending on the hardware you're using and the available libraries, it is sometimes worth considering using the DotStar/APA102 based strips instead of the Neopixel/WS2812 ones demonstrated here. The difference is that APA102 uses a lot more standard SPI-style signaling that's much less timing sensitive, at the cost of having one extra I/O pin used (data and clock rather than just data). If you're using a high-level device like a Raspberry Pi to drive the LED strips directly this can be helpful in getting consistent results because the operating system pre-emption can mess up the timings required for driving WS2812-based strips unless your device has a hardware block that can be co-opted to do the signaling for you, and an embedded hardware SPI peripheral is available on almost every embedded controller or processor that makes some kind of external I/O available so you can drive APA102 LEDs with nearly zero processor overhead on a broader range of platforms.
Let me add that the data throughput of dotstar LED's is much, much higher as well. Neopixel have a data rate of ~800KBPS if I remember rightly, wehreas Dotstars can run upto 10-15MBPS. If you have a long chain of LED's or need to update them really fast the Dotstars are much better. Also the internal PWM led brightness control is at a much faster rate, reducing a noticeable strobing effect on moving LED's.
This is all stuff I have known for decades. However I really enjoyed your delivery of the refresher!😀
Cool to see you come full circle on this channel. I originally subscribed to you back in the early days when you were talking about this stuff because I was interested in addressable LEDs. But it's great to get your full in depth explanations and historical insight on this stuff and love the metaphor for an electron pooping out a photon. LOL!
I appreciate how you deliver a ton of useful information in a way that’s easily digestible. You gained a subscriber 👍
Exactly, same for me .)
@@AnthoForever ... and me as well, thanks
Me too.
So do I!
He's Mitch Hedberg at 1.5x but for information.
I have the LED + ESP32 addiction too! Nice work Dave!
Getting an interest in those ESP32-S3 once I found out how fast TinyML runs on them.
What a cool and informative video Dave! Not since they came out with the Lite Brite have I found a video about light so fascinating! Thank you for this!
This IS the best channel on RUclips! Thank you for being you and for sharing your knowledge!
Love your videos but I'm especially happy to see you returning to LED videos!
Glad you like them! If I can keep people watching them, I'll do more!
I now understand LED physics: a scared electron poops out a photon when it jumps the gap.
Yep, it's the "doody cycle."
It's all at the atomic level. Everything gains and reduces according to force. Nothing is energy free. May the force be with you.
I didn't learn anything new from this video, but now I have a legitimately good source of information that I can use to teach others! Thanks again Dave!
Wow, what a great explanation! I love how you get right to the point without missing any important aspects and without dragging things out. I just found you and subscribed. Now I need to go find that module you mentioned. My only suggestion would be to put links in for the items you talked about. Thanks
I thought your channel was good before but this video is so succinctly and perfectly explaining pretty complex terms
I actually didn't know that every LED cluster had it's own microcontroller!
Well, it’s not actually a microcontroller, it’s a purpose-built LED driver IC.
... its own microcontroller! (The possessive pronoun HAS NO APOSTROPHE!)
Since I was a kid I've marveled at LEDs. It's like magic how they emit light and their many uses. They have evolved and come a long way and some can get remarkably bright. Thank you so much, Dave for creating this very informative video. It answered many of the questions I've had about LEDs and was so clear and concise. Looking forward to watching your next in the series.
This was an easy thumbs up and sub. A lot of practical content. Easily understood, and appreciated.
Excellent, clear, concise and informative... Thank you, just subscribed.
I remember when blue LEDs first came on the market around that time in the mid 90s. The local library had a copy of the RS Catalogue and I remember them being quite expensive.
I too remember as the electronics magazines of the time had articles about them. They were around $9 for a single blue LED. The only downside of them becoming cheap was virtually every product after that having a bright, blinding blue LED power light.
@@gblargg not to mention how annoying blue light is especially in a dark room. It was a trend which made my hair stand straight up atleast.
The blue LED was the game changer. Such an important ‘find’ for Flat screen
You can in fact do "current control" instead of PWM. PWM just happens to be a lot cheaper, and normally more efficient (although this depends). What a lot of LCD backlight drivers often do is switch between current-control and PWM control at a certain point for optimal efficiency.
You can also vary the voltage. I built a LED light with a dim feature that dims via series of diodes. A lot cheaper than using PWM.
I was doing a lot of flashlight modding and there you also have PWM or CC drivers. I prefer CC drivers for light like headlamps. . . because no flickering when you turn down the brightness.
Also i would never ever use a PWM controlled LED to light up fast turning machines. This could end up very very bad if PWM frequency and RPM of the machine match. Because it will look like the machine is not turning at all. Because of this problem there are special fluorescent tube drivers to compensate the 50/60hz flicker when you use them to light up a lathe. PWM control most of the times cheaper but comes with its own problems.
I would also complain about the statement that LED do not use any kind of filter or color changing layer to get the wanted color. Take a for example a 50W white LED and scrape off the phosphor layer and you will get a deep blue/ ultra-violet led. The white color is created by exposing the phosphor layer to deep blue/ ultra-violet light. By doing that the phosphor layer is emitting light that looks for our eyes white. And depending on the phosphor composition you get different CCT ranges and CRI values. And depending on temperature the phosphor layer is aging slower or faster (more heat =faster aging = more loss in brightness). So especially white LEDs are pretty close to fluorescent lights in functional structure.
@@kennmossman8701 What are you talking about? In any application where you've already got a microcontroller-anything the least bump up from a penny-crushing ultracastrati-the marginal cost of PWM is close to zero. We're at an inflection point where designing any circuit without a microcontroller runs against the grain, requiring a different set of engineering skills, and actually costs more money over all, except in the most extreme production volumes. Once upon a time, some blacksmith said "you can do that a lot cheaper by hammering wrought iron than by bending fancy steel". Where is that guy now? He's at home, alone, listening to his vinyl using a laser pickup, constantly annoyed at how crazy expensive it is to use a laser where a short stub of sharp metal would have sufficed.
@@afterthesmash If DG was only discussing strips and controllers then your comment is valid, but he wasn't. He was all over the place with wild generalizations. And that is what we are responding to. Try to keep up. Though your rant about blacksmiths and vinyl was weirdly entertaining - like just so bizarre.
Thanks for putting all of that in a way that was easily digestible. Very excellent video.
As busy I am with my own endeavors, I always enjoy watching yours. Keep them coming buddy.
Thanks, will do! Appreciate the kind words!
It's always a bit of a punch in the stomach when FastLED is mentioned. Dan Garcia and his partner Yulia were close friends and diving partners of mine and my partner. We almost went on that trip with them but had already committed to something else. Thank you for mentioning him, his memory lives on and he is missed.
I'm sorry for your loss Sam.
I feel you. Don't know if we've met. They are missed.
The first commercially practical incandescent light was sold by Joseph Swan in the UK, a year before Edison launched his bulb (although Swan's carbon rod did require rather high currents). Edison also only had his own breakthrough after he found Swan's UK patent.
you are everywhere
@@HelgeKeck 😂omnipresence has its benefits!
Edison was a salesman and kind of a jerk. The invention of lightbulbs is one of the history myths that should be corrected.
@@MrFirecasters wasn't edison basically just Elon Musk. (A rich guy that used other people's stuff and claimed it as his own.)
@@SmilingKratosTheGodOfWar If it was that easy, why don't you do it?
As a layman, I knew nothing of what you spoke about during your presentation. However your oratory skills and your being able to lay out perfectly the LED mysteries kept me glued. I’m still lost but feel I learned something today. Many thanks, I think?
That's quick and clear and with a lot of background information, thank you so much 👍
I'm in awe of you at how efficiently you've covered these technologies, Dave. It's as though you've found the perfect mental impedance match.
I liked the explanation of the electrons getting scared and pooping out a photon of light. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
I remember one of my elementary school teachers showing us a LED and, considering my age (and using my fuzzy memory :-) ), it was red. Thanks for this one, Dave!
Don't know how far back your memory goes, but it was red LED is all the way. Texas instruments calculators, LED watches, early tableside clocks...
@@47f0 that is due to not being other colours available or the extra costs using another colour would bring. Yes blue leds are still more expensive today.
@@ClosestNearUtopia yup. But were expensive is relative. Today, you can buy a bucket of almost any kind of LED you can imagine for what we paid for a few of those early red LEDs...
Of course the expensive part for me in owning one of those first Texas Instruments LED watches was not the watch, it was the batteries it constantly ate.
@@47f0 🤦🏼 yeah.. most cost I have from my washing machines is the electrical bill to… i am talking use and choice of components, were if you intend to use a led a blue one instead of using a red one it STIL is MORE expensive to do so.. its not even relative, altough all prices of such components dropped significant yes, like how tech always works.
Great video! Really fun to learn about LEDs as I had zero knowledge of them before. thanks
I had several thoughts while watching your presentation.
1. This guy really knows his stuff.
2. I wish my professors had been able
to teach as well as you.
Well done.
BTW, great shirt.
I want to play with these LEDs now. Put out a coded message in light write a phone app that will decode it.
Maybe knowing that is an easy option if needed is enough LOL
This video was suggested and wondered about what this magical LED was all about since I've used LEDs back in the late 70's. But what really took my interest was the mention of the book. I took a look at is on amazon and yep, I had nearly the same experience. Bullies was a huge part of school. I knew I had ADD when I quit college and got into marketing and sales. I didn't discover that I had ASD until my sister did a self-test. I took the test and I got 72%. I'm a very high functioning aspie.
I got into computer programing in junior high all thought high school. I was at the point they sent a small group of us to college to further advance our education. I joined the Navy out of high school where they discovered I knew something about computers. Ended up installing three Zerox 860s for the battleship USS Missouri. I was still getting beat up and picked on. Got out and went to college. That sucked so I spend 36 years on Marketing and Sales. I went knowwhere as the business was full of sharks. Went back to working on small ships and decided to get my captain's license. I only had the license for about 2 years and was chosen to teach and test students on their USCG license. Huge honor to teach for USCG licensing. The school I worked for got bought out and I was out of a contract. Now I'm restarting my life career in wedding photography.
Had I known what I know now about ASD and ADD, I would have taken different road. I would have not spent as much time in marketing and would have gotten my captain's license sooner. Then maybe retiring from that and moved onto photography. My hope now, is to become a millionaire in five or six years. Then start my own mini cruise ship company.
New subscriber. Bit tired today but that was the clearest explanation of this subject I’ve ever seen! Thanks so much!
Very cool! You explained it so well that now I'm not afraid to try it! Thanks.
PS - I ordered 2 copies of your book
Mentioning a CBM 8050 earned a sub, Sir. Excellent presentation of the history and modern LED designs!
I highly recommend using 6-pin APA102 instead of WS2812 (if you can afford the extra pcb routing complications). Being synchronous there are no critical timing requirements to play havoc with RTOS, Interrupts, servos and other timing critical functions. More expensive but definitely worth it if your code is doing lots of other stuff which, as it expands, could break your neopixel timing. ESP32 users know what I mean.
I wonder if someone could make their own tv with some fairly complicated code and these individually addressable LEDs
this was so helpful and clean clear!!! you killed it
I came here expecting to hear about bleeding edge LED tech, and went away finally having an understanding of how these neopixels work! That'll make what I want to do a lot easier, thanks!
12:09 Minor implementation detail: if you send too many the extra bits fall out the end of the strip thus it is recommended to position a bit bucket under the far end of the strip in such circumstances.
😄
Yes, this is important. Half of my floor is covered with bits. It's a rather nasty mess.
"Doody, I get it," says the man who earlier said that the electron poops out a photon. :)
I think I could watch any of these and still miss some of the references slipped in.
This was very well presented and made a complex subject understandable. Than you.
Woweeeee. That was very interesting. I loved it. Thank you, Dave. 👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼
Finally, someone that actually describes how these NeoPixel strips work! Thank you!
Some small corrections:
1:15 LEDs are actually still just about 30% efficient, but that's huge compared to incandescent lamps 3%
4:38 PWM is the most used way to dim LEDs because it's the simplest, but controlling the current with switch mode converters is the best way! PWM can cause visible flickering in cameras.
8:41 Not a microcontroller, but a tiny ASIC
LEDs can have an efficiency ranging between 40% and 50% so a bit better still!
If PWM is quickly switching the LED on & off then I have experienced it. I had a optometrest dialate my eyes and when returning home I switched the light on the vent fan to Low..With my sensitive eyes I could clearly see the light going on & off. sort of annoying
@@mikemiller659 yes that is what it is, usually is it switched on and off a few hundred times a second
This was very informative and well put! You did a great job at explaining this and the process thank you!
Really interesting & well explained. Thx
I was intrigued when I heard about individually addressable led's and bought a 100 segment strand some years back. They're much larger than the modern strips, wow!
I had them strung around a cat walkway in my house for years until I moved, they're in a box somewhere now. It was nice to be able to seasonally change their color pattern.
It'll be cool to see more on how to run them, might make a fun project, although I've never really "coded" besides notepad html when frames and IE 4 were cool, and some MS Q basic...
Yeah we do that in our house. I have built a network of Particle Photon and Argon MCUs and we have lights along a long passageway in our house using WS2812 where the light spreads out from the point where someone enters the passageway and we have porch and parking area lights (also Ws2812) which change automatically to Christmas colours 10 days either side of Dec 25th and so on.....
Easy Bake Oven: Wasted heat? Do I mean NOTHING TO YOU?
Hey, I said "usually" :-). But I'm going to order a Lite Brite and put a 300W LED lamp in it now.
Dave, what an excellent top level overview of multiple related concepts. Awesome!!! Subscribed
I found this video fascinating!! I learned cool new stuff and you made it entertaining. Nice Job! Thanks!
It's still annoyingly common to get a visible flicker when glancing past LEDs or screens on modern devices.
I somehow manage to see flicker in all manner of light fixtures. LEDs, i am not sure.
Honestly I think it's different from person to person. Some people can't tell if there are more than x amount of frames I would think it's the same
A complicated process explained simply and clearly....thanks!
New to your channel. I used to run a sound and lighting business before C-19 shut down all events. I have been always fascinated with lighting. Thanks for video.
This is a really interesting video. Even tough I am tinkering with those things for years, I still learned something. I can only add to this video by pointing people to the WLED-project which is a very powerful yet simple firmware for ESPs to control all the strips trough an app, website, voice assistant or however else you like. I have my complete lighting setup done with WLED, MQTT and Node Red. I would use Homeassistant if I would start new, but we all have to live with our decisions from the past. :D
Super useful info. Thanks!
Great video. You explain clearly even complex concepts.
Now it's time for you to send one of these sound visualizers to techmoan for a review. It would put to shame all those old ones from the 90s he's been getting.
I remember seeing a blue LED for the first time in the local electronics shop, I must have been about 8 or 9 years old and it would have been around 1986 or 1987, I was totally obsessed with them (in fact, I was quite obsessed with LEDs in general), they were about 10 times the price of a red or green LED so I couldn't afford one with my pocket money!
But commercial blue LEDs did not arrive until about 1993 or 1994, so I think your memory must be a bit off. Or you are Marty McFly :-)
Wow! I learned so much in this short video. Great work.
Oddly I just watched a video this past week about the exact dive fire of the FastLed creator.
Great video btw, definitely can listen to you all day
"If you want it to appear less bright, we have to accomplish it by turning the LED off and on rapidly". PWM is the WORST way to dim LEDs, it gives me a headache (I know, "humans can't detect such fast flickers", I guess I'm an X-Man). In PROPER use they should be dimmed via resistance, running them at their rated power makes them have a much shorter life than when they are dimmed via resistance. And it is completely possible to dim them via voltage, it's just not practical mostly due to the fact that LEDs aren't precisely voltage matched, so resistance (i.e. current limiting) is the best option.
Can't really agree. If you can detect PROPER pwm, like several thousand to tens of thousands of cycles per second, then you really are an X-Man! I'm also sensitive to flicker, and hate badly done PWM.
Good video but addressable leds have been out since 2010
They're not new to the market, but they seem unknown to a lot of folks!
yeah i watched like 10 minutes and was wondering why he explains basics of LEDs instead of the "New" LED he's mentioning in the title.. what a waste. i get that his subscribers may not know about this type but i felt the title is misleading. but seeing the overwhelmingly positive comments it seems like i'm the outlier
@@Burbsi yeah, no I came here thinking I had missed something new in led tech. Little bit misleading but informative to some I guess.
You rock Dave! Just found your channel and subscribed. Great thorough and entertaining information. Am also on the spectrum. Will order your book. Thanks!!
I already know all of this.
But you explain really well, so I stayed until the end of the video.
Thank you to share and spread knowledge!
What a great presentation No matter your knowledge of electronics this keeps you absorbed in the content
EE undergrad here looking for projects to put some of my new knowledge to use. Thanks for a great breakdown of this topic at multiple levels of depth.
Very interesting; thanks for sharing!
The best explanation i have seen , i even learned a thing or 2 , thx man , love it !!
Great video, just came across your channel and am hooked. Thanks Dave!
Wow. I thought "I" knew it all. You earned a sub here. Humbling, awesome. You are the kind of teacher we need more of.
Thank you Dave for the colorful illumination of the subject.
Thank you so much for explaining LED technology. Absolutely fascinating as I never new how mixed colors worked and how LEDs dim with timed light pulses. New sub here. 👍
Just discovered you and subscribed. Excellent and enjoyable video! I may well get sucked back into electronics as a hobby. Fun!
Thanks for the detailed explanation ☺️