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The aim of the project was to produce a colourful sound responsive LED display. It serves no purpose other than decorative but does look very nice and can add to the atmosphere in a room where music is playing. It is also a fun electronics project with which to learn more about arduino programming and electronics. It cycles through different sound reactive light patterns when a button is pushed. Some of the patterns contain multiple sub patterns.The project uses modern WS2812 addressable LEDs to produce the lighting effects. These LEDs consist of a red, green and blue LED on one chip combined with a tiny micro controller that takes a signal in and sets the brightness of all 3 colours using an 8 bit value for each channel. They update at high speeds to produce colour mixing effects and even animations. They use 3 wires; 5 volts, ground and a signal wire. An arduino micro controller generates the signal. An arduino is a simple, cheap and slow 8 bit computer that can run software to generate a signal to control WS2812 LEDs. It maxes out at 512 LEDs which is enough to produce good results.”

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