Finishing the Lightning Scene Backboard

We got a good start on wiring up our LED strip to the back of our lightning scene panel and tonight we’re finishing it up along with a few remaining tasks like roof shingles for the last castle steeple.

The LED strip is grouped into components that will each have their own animation – lightning bolt, thunder clouds, castle interior and the sky. Since this is my first LED strip project with Arduino I wasn’t sure if it’s easier to make different animations along one strip or whether I should break out each component into their own strip going into different pins of the Arduino.

After a bit of testing and learning more about the FastLED library, it ended up being very easy to make different animations along segments of a single strip so I wired the different components together in one continuous strip.