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Project Notes

#869 UART-TTL to LED Array Interface Board

Building a simple interface board for connecting a CH340-based UART-TTL adapter to an WS2811 or WS2812B LED strip.

Build

Notes

In LEAP#868 LED Array Control from macOS I played with controlling a string of WS2811 or WS2812B LEDs from macOS through a CH340-based UART-TTL adapter.

In these notes, I throw the connecting circuitry on a small protoboard for convenience.

Circuit Design

A simple board featuring:

  • 5V power supply connector
  • power decoupling capacitor
  • TTL (active-low) to WS28xx (active-high) logic inverter

Designed with Fritzing: see Adapter.fzz.

bb

schematic

Construction

A simple layout on a small piece of protoboard:

InterfaceBoard_board_build

InterfaceBoard_board_test

Final Test

Sending a GRB sequence to the first 6 LEDs in a WS2812B strip:

$ echo "00FF0000 00FF00 0000FF FF0000 00FF00 0000FF" | ../ws2812bify.py -p /dev/cu.usbserial-2420
Sending data to /dev/cu.usbserial-2420 at 2500000 baud...

InterfaceBoard_test

Credits and References

About LEAP#869
CH340WS2811WS2812BLED Array

This page is a web-friendly rendering of my project notes shared in the LEAP GitHub repository.

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About LEAP

LEAP is my personal collection of electronics projects - usually involving an Arduino or other microprocessor in one way or another. Some are full-blown projects, while many are trivial breadboard experiments, intended to learn and explore something interesting.

Projects are often inspired by things found wild on the net, or ideas from the many great electronics podcasts and YouTube channels. Feel free to borrow liberally, and if you spot any issues do let me know or send a pull-request.

NOTE: For a while I included various scale modelling projects here too, but I've now split them off into a new repository: check out LittleModelArt if you are looking for these projects.

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