APA102 Addressable LED Hookup Guide
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Arduino Library Overview
Note: This example assumes you are using the latest version of the Arduino IDE on your desktop. If this is your first time using Arduino, please review our tutorial on installing the Arduino IDE. If you have not previously installed an Arduino library, please check out our installation guide.
For the scope of this tutorial, we'll be using the FastLED library. The library will help you control the APA102's and provides example code to get the most our of your project. You can obtain these libraries through the Arduino Library Manager by searching for FastLED. The library also supports other LED chipsets. The second option is to download the ZIP file below from its GitHub repository to manually install it.
Parameters
When using the FastLED library, certain parameters need to be adjusted at a minimum to be compatible with the chipset. Depending on the example, the DATA_PIN can be referred to as LED_PIN. You may need to define the CLOCK_PIN or it can also be referred to as CLK_PIN. We recommend using a dedicated hardware SPI for best performance. However, if you decide to use a different pin, the library can be reconfigured to bit bang the pins. The LED_TYPE would be defined as the APA102 chipset. There are 60 LEDs per LED strip so NUM_LEDs needs to be set to 60. The COLOR_ORDER is BGR.
Once these parameters are set, you will need to initialize the LED strip configuration using .addLEDs<>() in the setup() function. Depending on the brightness and complexity of the animation, there are several methods to adjust the quality and appearance of the project like the color temperature, dither mode, refresh rate, FPS, or color correction. Below are two methods of setting up the LED strip for the APA102 configuration that we'll be using in this tutorial.
language:c
FastLED.addLeds<APA102, DATA_PIN, CLOCK_PIN, BGR>(leds, NUM_LEDS);
FastLED.addLeds<LED_TYPE,DATA_PIN,CLK_PIN,COLOR_ORDER>(leds, NUM_LEDS).setCorrection(TypicalLEDStrip);
FastLED.setBrightness() function to 32 in the setup() to avoid damaging the LEDs.
Microcontroller
The library is supported on a variety of Arduino compatible platforms. For a list of supported AVR or ARM microcontrollers, check out the list on the library's README.md.