When you buy a set of R3X lights, you will get everything you need from an electronics point of view to get up and running. This includes the three light boards, a breakout board, arduino nano (clone), and some wires. Extras you will need are some 3mm acrylic rod (as light pipe for the side lights) and some square acrylic pieces for the buttons.
Everything comes pre-soldered, so all that you need to do is connect from the IO1 header (not AIO1) to the first board with the longer cable, then daisy chain the other boards from that. Once you have them connected you can either plug in a USB-C cable to the nano, or connect a *clean* 5v source to the screw terminals (make sure it is 5v, anything more will blow the LEDs, anything less will not work and may damage the LEDs). Make sure the wires are the correct way round.
That’s it. You can adjust the trim pots to change the brightness and speed of the flashing (trim 1 is brightness, trim 2 is speed). Pressing trig1 will switch between plain white mode and ‘disco’ mode.
The breakout boards are a generic board, not specific to R3X, which means there is scope for adding extras such as eye LEDs, sound reaction, other LED panels, etc. I’m looking at a sound reaction option at the moment that will make the lights flash with the beat of any music/sound, but that is still a work in progress. IO1-4 are digital input/output pins, and AIO1-2 are analog (but can be used for digital).
Basic code can be found here:
