Got my USB RGB strips and controllers in to play with. Under $3/unit for pushbutton or under $4 with a remote control - crazy
Just need to get on and cut some Acrylic bits after a final tweak of the design.
Yep Youtube linking is broken
https://youtu.be/nvjXoZizHRA
Yup. Same thing I found when I was doing my Taranis RGB backlighting mod.
You can find 3-button multimode RGB controllers for 99¢, and ones with IR remote for $1.75-$2.75 and RF remote a dollar or two more than those, depending on how fancy the remote is. Even in small lengths, the 5050 RGB strip is cheap... like 10m for $4-5. A lot of vendors out there doing this by stitching together "cut ends" and selling the result as 5-15m "short reels" of strip. The only problem I've had was vendors misrepresenting the LED density; "accidentally" sending low-density 30LED/m strip instead of the "standard" 60LED/m.
WS2812 strips are not much more expensive, and both types are also available with RF remotes that can easily be embedded in your project requiring no external holes at all. But the PWM noise generated by all of them is atrocious; especially the high-density WS2812 144LED/m stuff, which is typically controlled by bit-banging a DAC output at 1.25uS PW on an Atmega8 or an ATTiny.
It ALSO draws crazy current... like 4A at max brightness on a ~150mm long strip like this one.
But man... the light sure is even and the "footlighting effect" seen in my TX screen and your panels totally disappears.
Since I did my DIY, we've had two or three new generations of LED development; 5630 RGB/RGBW LEDs are now commonplace, with as much as 3x the lumens for almost the same current draw.
Pololu's
product page on the stuff gives you a good start on understanding how addressable LEDs think; their prices are crazy-high, but they do sell better-quality strip and you're paying "STEM/Junior Robotics Lab" prices if you buy from them.
Ok all this speak of crap spectrum analysers and stuff has got my appetite whet for finishing off my crap spectrum analyser
Project underway. Am doing a hybrid of the W7ZOI one with VU2ESE's mods and some of my own blocks I have been working on (200Hz RBW filter, software front end) which should give me the ability to build a tracking generator for it later and shift a lot of the calibration and normalization off to software on a PC. Nothing spectacular here. DC to ~70MHZ which gives me the 5rd harmonics of the highest HF band I work in. Going to AVR-gcc it rather than tarduino and use the thing as a dumb command/query serial API.
Objectively this will be a CRAP spectrum analyzer. But it'll allow me to feck around and see if very basic things are doing what they are supposed to be inside the radios I build rather than pissing in the dark and ending up with wet socks which is the current status quo. So harmonics, filter measurement, looking at mixer products etc.
Budget is set at 6% of the price of a DSA815TG as I mostly have the parts already.
Fabulous... simply fabulous! mnem
* instigating-ily *