Thank you all for all the help with making this project happen. It rotates between 8 presets every 30 or so seconds. It was perfect for the electric run.
Wow looks great! Did you do anything special to make it ‘tougher’ to withstand the jostling of the run?
Mainly I used a generous amount of solder on the led strips connections. I then used a piece of cardboard to support the resistor and end piece of the strip so it wouldn’t bend. I used an Altoids mint container to house the Teensy 3.1 and drilled a hole to put the usb power cable, data, ground, and 5v out from the teensy. Lastly, I made sure to have slack on all cables to make sure that running doesn’t tug on the components.
For the power connections to tie all the led strips together to the controller (3x 25 led strips), I used twist on wire connectors and electrical tape to hold it on to the twist on. (originally was doing solder, but it caused some connection issues).
The power was hooked up to an Anker 20,000 mah laptop battery (overkill but I plan on using it to actually power my laptop when this is not in use).
This setup survived a 5k run and a jumping dance party concert after the 5k. I was really pleased how it turned out! =]
I’m curious about the laptop battery part: tell me more? What sort? What voltage does put out?
Depends which way you use it. The USB port puts out 5 volts (what I used). The power port outs out 12v, 15v, and 19v. Weighs probably a pound max and is the size of a 7 inch tablet. Anker is the brand name. As of now, running 3x 25 led lights, it lasted for 6 hours and just went down one power light indicator (there are 5 indicators that show depletion on the unit.) not sure what the math is on that, but that is about 24 hours on a single charge.
Typed this on the cellphone, sorry for the spelling and grammar errors.
Can you share your code?
When I get it ironed out sure. The code runs great for about 30 minutes then freezes at times. I am trying to trouble shoot what is going wrong with it to cause that.
@Mark_Kriegsman You can use a ‘power bank’ like this: http://www.x2element.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/powerbank.jpg
They have Lipo’s and are voltage-regulated to 5V (USB). Cheap as buggery on aliexpress. I just rip them apart and wire directly to the terminals.