Isolated WS2812 Driver for Fade Candy

Octocontroller Lg

Isolated WS2812 Driver for Fade Candy.

I designed, as part of the Luminescence project, a pair of boards to allow a Fade Candy controller to drive remote WS2812 LED strips at distances of up to approximately 100 feet (30 meters). These boards can also be used with other controllers such as the Teensy 3.1 running the OctoWS2811 driver.

The OctoController board contains the Fade Candy and converts the logic-level output signals into differential pairs driven over 4 wires in a standard Cat-5 ethernet cabling. It also provides connection for a 24VDC power supply to supply power over the other 4 wires in the cable. 24VDC was selected to meet the maximum current carrying capability of Cat-5 cabling. The differential data and power systems are electrically isolated from the Fade Candy and ESD protected. Each OctoController is connected to four DualDriver boards.

The DualDriver board contains a DC-DC converter to generate 5VDC at up to 30 watts for two WS2812 LED strips and a differential to TTL converter for the data. It also includes ESD protection.

The Hand Weavers Guild of Boulder County, who commissioned this design, graciously allowed me to release it as Open Source Hardware.



How it’s made – Ladyada and Micah Scott manufacturing Fadecandy at Adafruit.


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