Off-topic: Has anyone ever tried driving WS2812 LEDs with an analog circuit instead of a microcontroller? Like if you used 555s to drive multiple oscillating signals at slightly different frequencies, added them together, and used that for your data line (maybe with another timer to latch the signal periodically, to guarantee that the accumulated data gets displayed).
I’m sure that unless you got the frequencies into specific ranges, you’d probably just end up with what looked like noise, but I just wondered if anyone had ever tried it…
I have played with 555’s decades ago and understand them. I have played with adressable LEDs more recently but only with various Arduino like microcontrollers. I understand the WS2812 data timing.
I am not aware of anybody trying to do this with 555’s but it seems to me similar to building a full sized car using LEGOs (That has been done by the way… ) but what is your motivation and can you provide more details like number of LEDs ? what kind of animation you are looking for ??
@JP_Roy Only motivation is curiosity – something in the comments of another post just triggered the thought for some reason.
And not looking for any particular sort of animation. I suspect you could end up with something like my “ColorWave” animation, which just uses separate sine waves on R, G, and B, with differing frequencies and phase shifts. Or, like I said above, if the frequencies are too out of whack with the LED bit timing, it might end up just looking like random noise.
Again, just wondering if anyone had ever actually tried it. Just for fun.
One way i could see this would be for the 555 to be a master clock to cycle through a 24 bit parallel to serial shift register… load parallel RGB values and shift out data sets… animation would be painful but could be via an addressing EPROM control
@John_Sullivan I agree. My own curiosity got me thinking of how it could be done also but apart for the fun of doing something that has most likely never been done before I would not take that challenge when a $3 Arduino would wiz around the results of weeks if not months of design, breadboarding, pain and suffering !
That being said I would love to see a maniac take it on and actually do it !!!
Actually, I had a brain-fart — I meant to suggest something more like an opamp, not the 555. Analog wave forms, added together, crossing the logical HIGH threshold at various times.
