Multicolor Knight Rider With RGB PL9823 LED + Arduino UNO

If you know the famous leds WS1012 you don't ignore this tutorial.
The PL9823 the cheapest led that use the same protocol of the WS1012 led. You can use this led for make a ledstrip or also a led matrix. PIX (http://www.0lab.it/portfolio/pix-rgb-led-matrix/) is a led matrix made with WS1012 matrix. This matrix use 64 WS1012 leds. But in this tutorial we go to create a simple and efficience "knight ride" with PL9823 leds and Arduino UNO.

All the materials are:

• PL 9823 leds X 5
• Breadboard X 1
• Arduino / Genuino UNO X 1
• Some jumper cables

If you want make a PL9823 strip board, you can have also

• Perfboard
• Welder

You can see in the image the circuit. Pay attention to PL9823 led's model. If you use a F-8 model (see the image) you can use the long one pin like GND. If you use the F-5 model the GND is the second one long pin.
Take care and pay attention to VCC pin and GND pin. You can burn and broke the led immediately if you connect the pin GND to VCC and vice versa. After this you can connect the communication pin. Use DIN for Arduino UNO signal, and DO to pass the signal to other PL9823 led.

You can use thousand of leds.

The first one ting is import the Adafruit neopixel library. See the Adafruit GitHub page: https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_NeoPixel

or Adafruit site page to direct download and installation info:

https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-neopixel-uberg...

Put the library in the library folder in the Arduino project folder.

After download the PL9823 file and upload to the Arduino UNO.

As you can see by the code the most important thing is the line:

Adafruit_NeoPixel strip = Adafruit_NeoPixel(NUM_PIXELS, PIN, NEO_RGB + NEO_KHZ400);

The "NEO_GBR" is for the WS2812b leds model, the NEO_RGB is for this model. The velocity of communication is NEO_KHZ400 for the WS2812 is 800.

Now you have a multicolor Knight Ride. You can solder the leds on the perfboard like in the photo.