The beginning | Almost a year ago me and Viktor started working one a project now called Altitude Lights. In our new office in Örebro Sweden we have planned to install 18 x 5m long NeoPixel stripes with a total of 2700 RGB leds, to brighten up our everyday lives.
The hardware
The installation is powered by 3x 600w 5v PSUs and controlled by one Particle Photon. The LEDs are 2700x WS2812B aka NeoPixel, Individual Addressable V5 RGB LEDs.
To make this big NeoPixel installation work we used an Adafruit bi directional quad logic level shifter. Without this piece the digital output voltage (3.3V) from the microprocessor will not be enough to light all the lights on the strip. First we used only one digital output pin to control all the LEDs, but the (small) voltage difference between the PSU and the number of pixels maid it glitchy and almost impossible to use. We solved this by dividing the stripe into 3 sections with different level shifters, PSUs and digital output pins.
Today
The project is almost done, the only thing left is to give the lights life. Particle has its own cloud and there is a lot of cool things you can do with the photon hardware. We now need your help and creativity to help us code the lights into something amazing. To participate and get the simulator checkout our GitHub https://github.com/Altitude365/AltitudeLights.
Not only can you win cool hardware, but your code will run in our castle and forever be remembered in the history of Altitude365.
