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Reviews (7)
Dec 17, 2015
Very Cool
It's a silly little light on a stick -4 soft white LED's, that light up when you plug it into a USB port or a charger or where ever a USB plug will fit. Very inexpensive and great to give out as a gift to your tech friends. Everybody is impressed. If you have a USB extension cable with both male and female ends it can act as a light at the end of a wire. I know, silly, but very cool. TS
Jan 14, 2020
All as expected.
all what it is suppose to be at the right price, delivered.
Feb 09, 2016
A Review of the DMX to SPI Decoder
8 of 8 found this helpful I’m involved in the design of theatrical lighting and sometimes that calls for an array or strip of LED lights. Recently I have been experimenting with the WS2812b chips/lights on a strip for special effects. I have been powering these strips with an Arduino but I wanted something more theater oriented since all of the lighting is run by DMX signals from the lighting console.
I looked at a number of circuits on eBay and found that a lot of them have descriptions that are a little bit cryptic as they are written by engineers and circuit jockeys that make great circuits but don’t get the point across verbally that well. You almost have to buy the circuit to figure out exactly what it does. So here I am to let you know what I have found.
The WS2812 strips that I have run on 5 volts and they use a certain kind of signal know as SPI or Serial Peripheral Interface which is a way of sending complex data through the strip in order to tell which lights to turn on, for how long and how bright. This is SPI data protocol. Lighting control boards put out a DMX signal (Digital Multiplex) to signal dimmers and lights and other gear to control them remotely.
This little gem of a circuit board will translate your DMX signal into a SPI signal so that you can control individual pixles on your WS2812b strip.
Apparently it can also control WS2801’s and other chip driven LED strips but I have not used the board for that purpose so I can not comment on it.
The board is wired for 7 to 12 volt operation but if your strips operate on 5 volts, like mine do, the first thing you have to do is solder in a little jumper wire (yes, you have to scrounge around for your own jumper wire – I can’t help you there –use a part of a paper clip if you have to) onto the circuit board. The board comes with no instructions so look at the image on the eBay listing and see where it says “If power 5V install a jumper”. Do this right off the bat or you can damage your light strip.
Next, hook up your DMX lines and mind the polarity. There is a little blue jumper next to the DMX terminal block that when it is in place, activates a 120 ohm terminal resistor useful if this is the last DMX device in a string of devices which of course you already understand pulling on your knowledge of DMX set up which we will not cover here. Not that important.
Next hook up your WS2812b strip to the data terminal and power the board and your strip with 5 volts and ground hooked up as shown on the listing. The W2812’s don’t use the clock terminal but you already knew that.
Before powering up, set the DIP switches to the DMX address you wish to start the first green light in the first pixel. All others will follow in a Green - Red - Blue progression. If your DMX console is putting out 512 channels, you can control 170 (and two thirds) pixels each with their own green, red and blue led’s. This is very cool but for every foot of LED strip, you will use a ton of DMX channels; no you aren’t doing anything wrong.
The decoder itself does not take a lot of power but if you are running say, 100 pixels, the strip itself will start pulling down the voltage at your decoder when they are all on. You have to take care to get a heavier gauge wire to your strip, directly from your power supply to avoid this voltage drop. In my experience, if the voltage drops below 4.6 volts at the decoder, the processor will stop working and the handy little orange light on the board that tells you that you have a valid DMX signal will go out. You may have to power down to get it going again.
It’s a solid circuit, a good price since it would be a pain to build it from scratch and the little DMX indicator light is nice. It would also be nice to have a power indicator light on board but I just like a lot of little lights.
I had that voltage drop problem because, silly me, I was watching the power consumption and not the voltage. When I wrote an e-mail to the supplier, they answered right back and I fixed the problem. I also appreciated the fact that they didn’t call me stupid.
It’s a well built, fun board and I plan to buy more in my quest for world domination. Can't wait to see what else it can do.
Tom Sadowski
Maine, USA