And here is the “blowtorch”!


It is another piece of “wearable electronics” theater prop.
It has 2×12 RGBW LEDs + 3 RGBW LEDs + 12V fan, powered by car starter Li battery (because I needed both 5V and 12V).
As usual, I controlled it from BluePill board (STM32F103C8T6). I use mechanical (i.e., not solid-state) relay to turn the fan ON.
When it comes to controlling RGB / RGBW strips, BluePill is the king!
Oh, but you can control it from the other boards, even a regular Arduino, right?
Well, you can, but will you sleep well after looking at the library source code?
Shall you control everything from the BluePill? Now, for the other hardware Arduino like 32U4 is better.
So how light strips are different? They require very fast data transfer with precision timing.
BluePill has high quality SPI library that uses DMA. It has 2 SPI channels, both DMA-powered, meaning, you can control 2 strips independently. I did in the “blowtorch”, and I confirm it works.
If you see that your light strip behaves erratically, do not rush to blame the BluePill or the strip! Very likely, you are writing to a LED # beyond the length of the strip. It happened to me a few times