hoping for some guidance i’ve been researching all night but my brain is fried and there seems to be a ton of options.
Basically im creating a fish tank lid light that will be enclosed, and will have an ir controller to cycle through colours and modes.
i need it to be low profile to go with the aesthetics of the tank but with the addition of a breadboard its going to make the enclosed lid very thick, im trying to figure out what products i need to get the lowest profile i can!
Effectively i want this light to be controllable by an ir controller to cycle through colours
so i believe my questions are.
What microcontroller?
What breadboard to achieve the lowest profile?
anything else other than wires and solder and programming etc?
For that one, the most compact way of doing it would just be using an Arduino Nano.
You can connect both the NeoPixel Ring and IR sensor to the Arduino. Unfortunately, you aren’t able to power the 16 NeoPixels from the Arduino alone as its GPIO pins can only output around 40mA.
Alternatively, you could use the Adafruit GEMMA M0. This board uses Micropython but you can program it in the Arduino IDE.
From there you can interface the IR sensor with the Arduino/GEMMA and have it detect what you want and output data to be read by the Arduino/GEMMA. This data will then be processed by the program you upload to the Arduino/GEMMA and will produce a corresponding output on the NeoPixel Ring.
Just a note, digital sensors like IR sensor (only have an on and off state) can’t produce a whole lot of different output data. I’d suggest trying an analog sensor (e.g. ultrasonic, microphone, lux sensor etc) so you have more data values to work with when controlling the LED strip using the program.
