This advanced project shows you how you can drive a 16 NeoPixel ring and Sharp IR distance sensor using an inexpensive ARM Cortex M0+ LPC824. The LPC824 was used due to it's low cost, and an interesting peripheral it has called the State Configurable Timer, which allows us to offload the tight NeoPixel timing requirements to a HW peripheral.
This project is not based on the Arduino IDE, and uses an Eclipse-based IDE that is designed for this MCU family. Bare metal software development gives you full control over the software development process, but also has a higher learning curve and this should be considered an advanced project as such.
This was largely a personal project, wanting to keep up to date with recent members of the LPC800 device family from NXP, but it's being published here in the hope that it proves useful to other people interested in driving NeoPixels with a small, but powerful and flexible MCU like the LPC824!
Hardware Requirements
- NeoPixel Ring - 16 x 5050 LEDs (RGB)
- Sharp IR Distance Sensor - GP2YOA02YK
- LPCXpresso824-Max Development Board: This board isn't available from Adafruit, but can be purchased from a large number of distributors (click the link to see a list on Octopart).
Page last edited April 20, 2017
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