DonGorgonZola
The plan to start this project came to me when discussing domotica related projects with a friend of mine. He wanted to illuminate his stairs using leds so I thought it would be cool to make this interactive. Initially it would just be some cheap led strips plugged directly to an Arduino but this was not enough. So, we got 15 meter, 12Vdc, 1A/m flexible LED strip which obviously can't be hooked up directly to an Arduino. After trying multiple PCA9685 shields which didn't have enough power, I ended up with a PCA9685 shield including FET's from Ledsee.com. This shield seemed to work very well on an Arduino Uno and I was blinded multiple times during initial testing.
Now I was getting somewhere although I missed some real interaction. I found the Blynk app with which you can easily add Android/OS integration in multi-controller projects so I gave it a try. I had some Wemos D1 ESP8266 boards laying around which are perfect for hooking up systems to WIFI and in this case, connect using Blynk. These boards are Arduino compatible so the shield fits right onto it.
The shield connects using I2C but for some reason my Arduino Uno saw the PCA chip right away using I2C Scanner but my Wemos didn't. It turned out that even tough the pins match, the Adafruit PWM library uses different pins for I2C than the standard D4 and D5. Bridging these using jumper cables did the trick.
For now, I'm trying some different patterns and soon I'll be installing the strips and post some cool videos :)
Luke J. Barker
Aron Bordin
Hulk
Video? This looks real cool.