This Guide shows you, how to assemble/connect the Strip­In­vaders Sys­tem. You need:

  • WS2801 LED Strips
  • An Arduino Eth­er­net Board and a USB/Serial Light Adapter to upload the firmware
  • 5 Volt power sup­ply – I use an old ATX Power supply
  • Optional: Grove — Base Shield and Cables

Also make sure that the Strip­In­vaders Sketch is already on your Arduino!

This is my WS2801 LED Strip:


You see that the con­nec­tions described on the Strip itself (Black: 5V, Green: Clock, Red: Data, Blue: GND).

Now it’s time to con­nect the Grove Base Shield to the Arduino Eth­er­net:


The Grove Cable is con­nected at Port nr. 4, this means Yel­low: D4, White: D5, Red: V+, Black: GND. Hint: D4 means Arduino Dig­i­tal Pin 4, D5 means Arduino Dig­i­tal Pin 5.

Almost done, now con­nect the cable from the Arduino Grove Shield with the LED Strip and the 5V power sup­ply. This should look like this:

Now con­nect the Strip­In­vader to your LAN and power up Strip­In­vaders. Try to ping the host “invader.local”, this is the mDNS name of the Strip­In­vaders Arduino device.

The Strip­In­vaders can be con­fig­ured with­out re-uploading the Arduino sketch, by send­ing a spe­cial OSC mes­sages (/cfg). Take a look at this Pure­Data exam­ple:

In our exam­ple we send “/cfg 66 5 4 96″. The first para­me­ter 66 is just a magic byte, it must be 66, period. The sec­ond para­me­ter defines the data pin, the third para­me­ter defines the clock pin and the last para­me­ter define how many led pix­els are installed.

Links: Strip­In­vaders System

Look, it’s really easy ma:

Edit 4.2.2012:
I just released the Strip­In­vaders con­fig Tool (for OSX and Win­dows), this should sim­plify the setup process. Here is a screen­shot:

StripInvaders Howto Assemble

13 Comments

  • 1 Robert wrote:

    Hey, just got your strip, get­ting the Arduino Eth­er­net board with adapter and POE tomor­row. Just won­der­ing if the POE will be enough to power the strip, if not and I need to buy a power sup­ply how many amps should I be look­ing for? cheers

    January 18, 2012 at 18:34 Permalink

  • 2 michu wrote:

    To be hon­est, I don’t have a clue. I don’t have the POE ver­sion nor a POE injecter. But I guess it depends on the injec­tor. Accord­ing to this paper: http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/article/HONSHI/20071127/143095/ the default power is about 13Watt. My Strip needs up to 10 Watt per meter (when full white)…

    January 18, 2012 at 23:58 Permalink

  • 3 Robert wrote:

    Hey again, almost there,
    I got myself a ATX power sup­ply. my setup is with­out a base shield so am I right in assum­ing that the 5v goes from the Vin on the arduino to the 5v on the ATX and then onward to the strip (black wire) and the same for the ground which goes to the blue wire? I’m so close I don’t want to blow any­thing!! It could be and idea to have a photo with­out the base shield…

    January 25, 2012 at 21:44 Permalink

  • 4 michu wrote:

    Take a look at Seeed­stu­dios Wiki: http://www.seeedstudio.com/wiki/index.php?title=Stem_-_Base_Shield

    GND is GND (sounds good, eh?), 5V to 5V (again, sound pretty log­i­cal). As long you don’t con­nect 5V to the 3.3V con­nec­tor, you can­not blow anything.

    January 25, 2012 at 22:01 Permalink

  • 5 Robert wrote:

    Hello Michu,
    …My base shield comes tomor­row, in the mean time I’ve got some lights ablink­ing but need to setup my DHCP sever. I’ve tried a few tur­tioials and down­loaded some third party soft­ware. Just won­der­ing what you used. I’m Win­dows 7. Is there a par­tic­u­lar tuto­r­ial you fol­lowed?
    cheers

    February 1, 2012 at 03:14 Permalink

  • 6 michu wrote:

    Hey Robert

    I guess your Router/Firewall/Wireless Access Point should have an option to act as DHCP server, that would be the eas­i­est solu­tion. And if you don’t like DHCP you can also com­pile the Strip­In­vaders Firmware with a sta­tic IP assigned.

    Hope that helps
    cheers

    February 1, 2012 at 08:43 Permalink

  • 7 m@nu wrote:

    hey michu

    where do i get these “clamps” from which you use in your video to con­nect the cables?

    thank you & cheers,
    manu

    February 13, 2012 at 11:45 Permalink

  • 8 michu wrote:

    hey manuel, they are called Scotchlok UR2. Cheers

    February 13, 2012 at 12:19 Permalink

  • 9 m@nu wrote:

    thanks :) hope to find them in the “bau&hobby”

    btw. thanks for the doc­u­men­ta­tion of your great project!
    try­ing to assem­ble a “strip­in­vader” by myself at the moment.

    February 13, 2012 at 13:35 Permalink

  • 10 Tom wrote:

    Hello,
    I am try­ing to com­pile this code, but if I include audio, it says it is too big to fit onto the Arduino. Is there a workaround for this?

    February 15, 2012 at 04:27 Permalink

  • 11 michu wrote:

    Dis­able audio OR dis­able some mDNS/Bonjour fea­ture OR use a micro­proces­sor with a larger ROM. any­way this is one the issues I want to address…

    February 15, 2012 at 09:17 Permalink

  • 12 ethan wrote:

    Is there any way I could have dam­aged the ws2801 chips by send­ing wrong data down the wrong wire? Eg send­ing CLK into SDI?

    February 20, 2012 at 11:10 Permalink

  • 13 michu wrote:

    nope, you can­not destroy you strip by switch­ing data and clock…

    February 20, 2012 at 15:23 Permalink

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