Newbie questions

For Adafruit customers who seek help with microcontrollers

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struch
 
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Newbie questions

Post by struch »

Hello,

im here because im new to microcontrollers. Saw some sketches, read a lot, but still confused. My next project consists of 2 printed parts which should have leds strips inside.
No fast animations, but a few meters per part.
They should be able to connect to wall plug but could be arranged all the time. So thats why i also have to learn connecting them to wifi. 20m with BLE may not work.
So until now i always controlled led strips with raspberry pis. Running a React based UI with a Python Flask or Node.js Server. Fine until here.
Then i read again a lot of the brilliant tutorials here but as i said now i feel very confused.
I dont know which microcontroller i should buy. As i understand, my animations or commands will come over wifi from the Raspberry and the microcontroller only deliver the colors to the strip. So maybe for this little thing i dont need one who can run curcuitpython. Maybe with less pins? Then i saw there are microcontrollers who have 2 seperated chips for wifi, at least one have wifi and everything in one chip. Since i dont have to much experience with microcontrollers, maybe a single chip with wifi is easier?

Would be really great if you have some tips

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dastels
 
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Re: Newbie questions

Post by dastels »

I've found that the easiest way to incorporate Wifi is to use one of the Airlift products. There's great support in C++/Arduino as well as CircuitPython. I would suggest an "M4 Express" board to keep you options open:
- Metro M4 Express AirLift is a larger (Arduino UNO footprint) board but is an all-in-one solution with the Wifi integrated on the board.
- Feather M4 Express + AirLift FeatherWing is smaller and the airlift featherwing stacks on the feather. It has builtin battery support which doesn't sound inportant for your project.
- ItsyBitsy M4 Express + AirLift Bitsy is even smaller and stacks the same way. No builtin battery support.

Links:
Metro:
https://www.adafruit.com/product/4000

Feather:
https://www.adafruit.com/product/3857
https://www.adafruit.com/product/4264

ItsyBitsy:
https://www.adafruit.com/product/3800
https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-air ... -processor

Dave

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struch
 
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Re: Newbie questions

Post by struch »

Thank you for the tips. I think i will order the Metro M4 Express Airlift and ItsyBitsy M4 Express + Airlift Bitsy. One for each part to test.
I wanted to order some led strips too and researched again. DMA driven would be faster. Then i saw Dotstar are even fasten.
And then i wonder myself if without DMA is still faster than doing http requests over rest api which i saw in the examples of wifinina. Didnt saw something like websockets.
Do you know something about this topic or should i ask this in another topic? I used websockets to communicate between react client and my server which stores the animation logic. What do you think is the best case? That my Raspberry Server is a Client which sends commands via request to the microcontroller(server), the microcontroller is a client which connects to the raspberry server and ask for commands(dont think is a good solution) or there is a websocket connection where both can send commands?

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dastels
 
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Re: Newbie questions

Post by dastels »

The web stuff isn't my speciality so I can't help much there. My thought is that you'd want to send an entire animation sequence to the microcontroller and it would play it out on the neopixels or dotstars. If you are using CircuitPython on the microcontroller you could even send it python code that implements the animation and have it executed.

As for speed, how fast you to need it? You initial post says "no fast animations". What sort of animations do you plan? How many NeoPixels/DotStars?

Dave

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struch
 
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Re: Newbie questions

Post by struch »

Very interesting. I always thought i have to make my animations on the server side, because microcontroller A dont know anything about microcontroller B. Means Server has to send every frame very fast and the microcontroller only knows the next step to display.
Maybe putting animation logic onto microcontrollers lower this requirement for speed over wifi. But next to slow color transitions and pulses the fastest animation would be audio visualization which will come from a central audio jack.
The amount of led per part will be around 600.

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