by Max Maxfield
The funny thing about knowing something yourself is that you tend to assume everyone else knows it also. This is especially true on a site like EEJournal that attracts electronic engineers and embedded systems developers from all walks of life. But the funny thing is when you actually get to sit down and chat with people you begin to realize how little they typically know outside their own area of expertise.
The same is true the other way round of course. In fact, although I don’t like to boast, I think it’s fair to say that people are often amazed to discover how little I know about almost any topic they care to mention. Not that this stops me from talking about those subjects, you understand; as I’ve said on many an occasion, much like my dear old mother, the real trick is to get us to
A typical Arduino Uno prototyping scenario.
First of all, we see the Arduino Uno in the lower-left-hand corner of the image. A little to the right, we see a stick of eight WS2812B tricolor LEDs (commonly known as “NeoPixels” because that’s what the folks at Adafruit call them). In addition to red, green, and blue sub-LEDs, these little scamps also contain three 8-bit pulse-width modulators (PWMs), thereby allowing each NeoPixel to display 2^8 2^8 2^8 = 2^24 = 16,777,216 different colors. Also, these little rascals are daisy-chained together, which means we can drive the whole stick using a single digital output from the Arduino Uno.