M0 driving neopixel strips.

[apburner]

I see that is says the strips are 5V. But the M0 is 3.3V. So my questions are. Will neopixel run on 3.3. And is I drive them with a lipo. Will they data line properly and data. I know to tie the ground to each other to make a common ground. What I want to do is wrap 2 meters of 144 led strips around a rocket and use the m0 to give it neat animations during night flights.

[dastels]

Generally speaking, Neoplxels will work fine on 3.3v (power and signal). I've run up to 48 like that. With a long strip (you have 2m with 288 pixels) you probably want/need to supply power at multiple points to mitigate voltage loss along the strip. A bigger issue is current. Each pixel will require at most 60ma when it's set to full brightness white. That's over 17A. With animations you won't have that. Say you have 10% of them on at a time at an average of half brightness. So that's 28 * 0.03 = .84A (840ma). That's a lot more than the Trinket's 3.3v regulator can handle (about 5x as much).

See https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-neopixel-uberguide and https://learn.adafruit.com/sipping-power-with-neopixels for more details.

Dave

[apburner]

The amperage was why I was wondering if I connected a battery directly to the strips and anchored to the trinket of I just needed to make sure the commons were connected together. I thinking one battery for the trinket and maybe one each for the strips. The rocket application will only need about a 30 minute run. I'll turn it on. Then take it to the launch pass. Then Launch it and retrieve.