Toby Segaran

For New Years 2013, my friend Steve Davis organized a big party in Geyserville at a very strange venue with lots of Ocelots. I had an old HL1606 light strip that I’d bought from Adafruit so I thought it might be interesting to make something for the party.

Unlike newer light strips (the new WS2812 integrated strips are awesome), the HL1606 doesn’t support PWM, so there are a limited range of colors and they all run at full brightness. So while normally I might change the intensity of the lights with the power in various frequency bands, in this case I decided to go with more of graphic equalizer thing:

I particularly like how easy it is to see the different frequencies hit. Also, it’s really bright. As always, it’s hard to film LEDs at full brightness, but this definitely lights up the room.