I hope somebody is willing to help me with my project, I designed this mini proton pack and I decided to add some lights to my final project. I’m a super newbie with the electric part and coding, I’m using an Arduino Nano Ever since my proton pack is really small. I attached 2 pictures to show you the components that I’m using so maybe here there will be somebody with a lot of patience to help me out.
As a first step would be great to understand how to connect everything to the Nano without any short circuit
You can power the Arduino Nano from 9V (via the VIN pin, as long as you unplug the battery before plugging the USB cable into your computer or you might fry your USB port).
But the actual pins are only 5V, so they won’t be able to power LEDs which are designed for 12V.
LEDs are actually designed for around 3V (it varies) so for higher voltages they have resistors attached. The ones in your image would have resistors designed for lowering the voltage from 12V to 3V. So if you try to connect 5V, they’ll either be incredibly dim or they won’t light up at all. It’s similar for the 9V LEDs.
If you can find 5V alternatives for the LEDs you posted above, I think you’ll be able to make this work.
The Arduino Nano has 13 Digital pins and 7 Analog pins which can also be used as Digital outputs, so you could run the 9 LEDs from pins D2-D11 and the 4 Cyclotron LEDs from pins A0-A3. I’d recommend not using pins D0/D1 because they’re used for uploading Arduino code over USB (it can cause issues so best to leave them free).
If it helps you could also look at using Neopixels (WS2812 LEDs), they’re designed for 5V and only require 3 wires back to the Arduino. So all 4 Cyclotron LEDs could be connected to the same Arduino pin, they’re chained together. Same thing with the power cell.
Thank you so much for the super detailed answer! So ok let’s say I’m gonna change the lights with the ones you told me, how am I going to connect everything? Thank you!
