Neopixel leds and power supply fun

When you try to make hardware it sometimes turns out that every bit is the difficult bit. Like today for example. Yesterday my latest Neopixel lights arrived. They are on a strip of 8x32 pixels on a flexible pcb. It’s awesome, with power demands that I’m not that happy thinking about. The plan is to do something vaguely “Steam Punk” with them, perhaps involving my recently purchased top hat.

To celebrate I broke out my 10 amp 5 volt power supply. The one that I’ve not dared use yet. Having checked that the power supply produced a vaguely sensible voltage (around 5.5 volts) I tested the Wemos I was going to use (won’t get caught like that again) wired it all together and fired it up.This part of the project should have been the easy bit.

It didn’t work.

In a panic I disconnected the power supply, thinking that I might have wired the positive and negative wires the wrong way round (which is a good way to destroy anything). And suddenly it started working.

It turns out that this is completely normal behaviour. The problem is in the way that the NeoPixels detect their signals. They regard anything above two thirds of their power supply voltage as “true”. If the power supply is 5 volts two thirds of that is around 3.3 volts, which is exactly what the Wemos device produces on its output pins. Happy days.

However, if the power supply voltage is higher than 5 volts the voltage level needed to send a message to the NeoPixels becomes higher than the 3.3 volts that I get from the Wemos and so the communication starts to fail.

So it’s all down to my power supply being too powerful. There are two possible solutions. The first is to use a level converter to boost the signal from the Wemos to 5 volts so that the pixels will react to it. The second is to drop the power supply voltage down to 5 volts so that the maths is in my favour. Ongoing……