Arduino library for WS2812B – and potentially similar single-wire-based LED pixels – that is:

• Small
• Simple to use
• Easy to read and understand, thus fix and extend

Only tested with Arduino Uno, but should work with other AVR Arduino boards.

There are a lot of Arduino libraries that allow to control single-wire-based LED pixels with Arduino, some of which include:

• FastLED
• FAB_LED
• light_ws2812
• Adafruit_NeoPixel
• TinyWS2812B (this one being the most simple and readable I could find)

Most of these libraries, to me, seem a bit overcomplicated and are hard to read. That and a desire to understand Arduino better have led me to create my own library that hopefully doesn't suffer from these issues. All this said, having the libraries mentioned above as a reference helped me a lot when creating this library.

Probably the simplest way is to import the library using Arduino IDE by following this tutorial.

For terminal users:

• Run arduino-cli config dump and find user directory.
• Copy .cpp and .h files from this library to <user_directory>/libraries/KISS_WS2812B folder.

Start by including the library:

#include <KISS_WS2812B.h>

Use KISS_WS2812B type to control the LED, it consists of:

• Constructor:

  KISS_WS2812B(byte pin, unsigned int num_leds);

  The port will be derived from pin automatically.

• Colors structure:

  struct Color {
      byte r, g, b;
  };

  This structure can be used to create a color with where:

  • r member stands for the amount of red in the color.
  • g member stands for the amount of green in the color.
  • b member stands for the amount of blue in the color.

  Any of these members can have values in the range from 0 to 255. The higher the values, the brighter the color, thus Color {0, 0, 0} stands for black and is identical to turning the specific LED off.

  More about the RGB color model here.

• send_colors function:

  void send_colors(Color colors[]);

  Expects the length of colors array to be num_leds.

Here is a simple example:

#include <KISS_WS2812B.h>

#define NUM_LEDS 64

typedef KISS_WS2812B::Color Color;

KISS_WS2812B leds(4, NUM_LEDS);
Color colors[NUM_LEDS];

void setup() {
}

void loop() {
    for (int pos = 0; pos < NUM_LEDS; ++pos) {
        colors[pos - 1] = Color {0, 0, 0};
        colors[pos] = Color {6, 5, 2};
        leds.send_colors(colors);
        delay(100);
    }
    colors[NUM_LEDS - 1] = Color {0, 0, 0};
    leds.send_colors(colors);
}

I will abandon this project as it was made with Arduino that I have borrowed from university and I probably don't have a deep enough passion for Arduino to ever buy one for myself. I do, however, plan to accept PRs if there will ever be any. PRs that follow the existing code style and don't use unnecessary macros should be accepted.

MIT