Neopixel LEDs as status LEDs for Ardupilot

Sometimes there's just no good place to mount the external LED to on a copter or one simply wants more light output... While developing my own little light controller, I wrote a decoder which decodes the I²C control signals for the external LED and controls arbitray amounts of Neopixels accordingly.

NOTE: Never power any amount of extra LEDs from the flight controller or the flight controller's power supply! One Neopixel can pull up to 60mA. That accumulates pretty quickly into significant currents when using many.

To get started, solder a 4-pin I²C DF13-cable to your Nano or Pro Mini. Pinouts for the flight controllers can be found in the respective documentations. Then solder ground and data in of the Neopixels to ground and your chosen data out on the Arduino. You can choose the amount of Neopixels and the data out pin in the #defines in the code.

Find the code on GitHub: https://github.com/sgofferj/Ardupilot-Neopixel
You will also need Adafruit's Neopixel library: https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_NeoPixel

Original Article: http://stefan.gofferje.net/uav/219-neopixel-leds-as-status-leds-for-ardupilot

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Comments

  • Hello, maybe try without bootloader in you nano or promini or atmega8.

    Serge

  • Hi Stefan

    I have been using your project on an arduino nano . everything worked fine until I upgraded from .3.4.6 to 3.5.copter.

    working fine again after downgrading. the pixhawk still disables the onboard led, but no output on neo pixels.

    I hope you can help...

This reply was deleted.