this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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Is there an andúril light with actual rgb aux lights instead of the resistor ones or the single colour ones? If no, is it even possible with the microchip they use? I know its a pretty limited chip.

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[–] bquinlan 6 points 2 years ago

I'm not sure what you mean by the resistor Tones. All the Emisar lights have RGB auxiliaries. All multicolor LEDs use separate RGB emitters grouped close together. It is more obvious with the small ones, like the ones used for auxiliaries, but it's true of all of them.

[–] thefreeman 3 points 2 years ago

The aux LEDs are ON-high/ON-low/OFF and not controlled via PWM due to power consumption concerns for indicator aux LEDs that are designed to be ON all the time. With PWM the MCU has to stay awake and it would draw the cell too fast, due to that aux LED PWM control has not been implemented.

With the T1616 there might be a way to do PWM with relatively low power consumption, but that hasn't been tried yet.

[–] bunglesnacks 2 points 2 years ago

So you could have an infinitely color changing flashlight? That would be kinda neat. Don't really want to have to use an app to change the color though. It would be kind of hard to implement with a single switch control.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Aux can't be set to anything but high or low, so advanced colour mixing can't be done, if that's what you mean.

It is possible in theory to use some colours on low and some on high at the same time, but the brightness difference would make the low invisible.

Also, it can't be done with PWM because the MCU wouldn't be able to sleep when the light was off/locked, and there aren't enough free PWM counters IIRC anyway.

Maybe if there was a smarter RGB LED, that could have 3 values set via serial and it has a chip on it to do the processing and adjust its outputs, but such a device would be too large to fit where the current aux LEDs go on any light.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

There are 1515 neopixels iirc. It would fit. I just dont know if the mcus supported by anduril are fast enough.

[–] thefreeman 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Unfortunately Neopixels consume too much power, about 1mA quiescent current each, also min Vin is 3.75V according to the datasheet.

The other day I found this small RGB controller, 200uA quiescent current (LEDs off), 300uA LEDs ON, which is much better especially with only one controller for all the aux LEDs.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I don't really know much about neopixels, what do they need in terms of control, does it have to be a constant signal or can they just stay in a mode until another mode is set? How many MCU pins do they need?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

They need one pin for all neopixels. You can daisy chain them. You have to start sending the colours in order from last to first neopixel. Only problem is that it needs to be precise but idk how precise.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

1ms shouldn't be too hard (would just have to have the code to handle it be in the main loop, ideally, rather than an event handler). If it's significantly under 1ms might be a problem.

[–] TacGriz 1 points 2 years ago

true RGB... instead of the resistor ones

Do you mean like individually controllable with infinite colors instead of 7?

No. No Anduril lights have that. I don't think it's possible with how they're connected to the MCU.

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