Part 3b-The Shiftbrite LED

The next part I'll look at is the Shiftbrite LED. This will act as a warning light system as an object gets too close to the vehicle. Shiftbrite is a high-brightness LED module containing red, green, and blue elements. It uses a simple clocked serial interface to receive a 10-bit brightness value for each colour. That's over a billion possible colours. I'm thinking along the lines of using green as safe, blue as an initial warning and red as a collision is imminent. But I might change this as I go along.

Illustrated picture of aShiftbrite

These warning lights will co-exist with the distance the object is away. Green for greater than 2 meters, Blue for 20cm-2 meters, and Red for less than 20cm. These values may also be changed as I test the board. This is a limited use for the Shiftbrite, but it will suit my project. As I've researched it further, there are many applications for the use of these lights. The main selling point being that you can link several of these devices together. Each input to one Shiftbrite is buffered and can pass the signal to the next Shiftbrite. They also contain safety features including current control and automatic over-temperature control to prevent overheating.


The recommended supply voltage for these devices are between  5.5 to 9V. But because I'm only using just the one, the 5V supply from the Arduino board will suffice. This 5V should be sufficient to run up to 3 of these devices linked. With that in mind, I might add some more to the project at a later date, if I have the time.

Wiring the device to the Arduino will require 6 pins. Two pins for the Vcc and Gnd that I will share with the other devices and 4 pins to control the Data, Latch, Enable and Clock pins on the Shiftbrite.

I've examined some other projects that have used the Shiftbrites to familiarise myself with the kind of software that I will need to implement to use them the way I want. I quickly realised that there is no Shiftbrite library in the Arduino libraries, so I've had to download one and save it into library. The only problem is that there is no real reference to the functions in this library. But there are plenty of samples available that I have examined, understand and can now use.