I need some peggy advice please.

[jimcanswim]

Hi, I am new to all this so please bear with me.

I want to make a few marine charts with bouys which flash in a certain sequence. What would be the most suitable thing? Peggy 2? Peggy seems a bit overkill though.

I want to have about 60 Leds that flash in different sequences, I will have to wire each led to a flying lead and connect this to peggy, which seems quite difficult.

Also what are they physical dimensions of peggy and what duration does the batteries have?

Thanks for any advice.

• This topic was modified 7 years, 9 months ago by Windell Oskay.

[Windell Oskay]

The Peggy 2 (or 2LE) can do it, but it is indeed overkill. Probably the most straightforward way to use it would be to wire up 6 rows rows of 10 LEDs each, meaning that you’d need to run a total of 16 wires to the Peggy.

The Peggy 2 is 11.320×14.875″ in overall size:

 http://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/tinykitlist/75-peggy2

You might prefer to use the Peggy 2LE instead, as it is smaller (9.625×5.9″) and lower in cost:
http://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/tinykitlist/157

The Peggy 2 comes with a 3xD battery holder. One can be added separately to the Peggy 2LE as well: http://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/partsmenu/552

I’d estimate battery lifetime under this set of circumstances as about 150-250 hours if the LEDs are on all of the time, and 2-5 times that if the LEDs are flashing intermittently.  I’d certainly recommend turning it off when not needed or (much better) using a plug-in power supply.

Since you don’t need all that many LEDs, and they don’t need to be on all the time, you might consider using Charlieplexing, directly from a microcontroller, to drive the LEDs instead.   For 60 LEDs, you could do this with a microcontroller board like our Diavolino, using 9 digital output lines to drive a hand-wired matrix.  For a bit more about Charlieplexing, see our article about how the Bulbdial Clock works:

 http://www.evilmadscientist.com/2010/on-the-design-of-the-bulbdial-clock/

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