#60 LED Party Strobe - Part 1

It's Party Time! So what better way to show off the flexibility of an Arduino and your programming skills than to create an LED Party Strobe - and we'll learn something about PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) along the way too!

PWM is a mainstay of many microcontrollers, not just the Arduino family, as it allows the fine control of motors and LEDs (and even sounders if truth be told) so it follows that there is great interest in learning about this topic.

I've also included a 5-minute quick explanation of what PWM is, how it does what it does and why we need it at all, complete with a couple of oscilloscope videos to back up my explanation. It's straightforward to grasp and one of those fundamental building blocks every good Arduinite needs.

So what's wrong with the out-of-the-box capabilities of the standard Arduino? I hear you ask. Because it's just not flexible enough and here I'll show you how we can do something about that so very, very easily.

Next video will contain all the details of the actual LED strobe (and I'll release that sooner than usual) but it will all seem so very straightforward after watching this video (part 1) first!

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Here's the sketch to explore PWM with:
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And the library you'll need:
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If you like this video please give it a thumbs up, share it and if you're not already subscribed please do so :)

My channel is here:
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How can I remember this? Memory tip: "See" Ralph Bacon, geddit?

[abedbug]

Great channel Ralph, Interested to see part 2, I did something similar a while back to a 5m tape of 3825 leds via a mosfet to Arduino, but just used the analogWrite method to control the switching. Keep up the good work

[MyBigThing]

It's a damn shame people are so so dumb nowadays that this doesn't even have a thousand views....it deserves a million plus...too bad throw away junk and not being smart is what modern day society is devolving into...Great video Ralph!

[roberteliassen]

Ralph, the IRLZ44N is quite cheap. I got 10 pieces for $2.50 on eBay. It says "Logic-Level Gate Drive" in the datasheet and RDSon is 0.025 ohm at VGS = 5V. Not bad at all. Great video by the way.