Hotend NeoPixel mod for Artillery Genius

thingiverse

I love that Artillery printers come with an RGB LED on the hotend, it's a fantastic touch! But what if it could be brighter? And more rainbow-like? Since I was messing around with the case anyway to swap out my BLTouch probe for the stock inductive Z sensor per 3DPrintBeginner's awesome [how-to](https://3dprintbeginner.com/artillery-genius-auto-bed-leveling-stock-sensor/), I decided to go ahead and also swap the stock RGB LEDs for a small NeoPixel strip. NeoPixels have a more elegant connector interface consisting of just three wires—5V/Signal/GND—compared to the typical 4-wire GND/R/G/B LEDs, which frees up more pins for activities! In principle, it also means that you could add both the inductive Z probe AND NeoPixel LEDs to the hotend of the Sidewinder X1 using only the 4-pin LED connector. Here's how I did it: ## NEOPIXEL WIRING I used some individual NeoPixel boards I had laying around. (You can also get them in strips, which would be much more convenient.) For mine, I needed to solder together all the +5V pads, all the GND pads, and then connect each I/O OUT pad to the I/O IN pad on the subsequent NeoPixel. I used a little bit of solid copper wire that I pre-tinned. If you have some insulated magnet wire, it would be a lot easier to just scrape off a bit of insulation over the pads and solder them that way. Finally, I soldered on a 3-wire tail, terminating in a 3-pin male Dupont connector. ## NEOPIXEL MOUNT For the mount, I quickly printed it out of PETG, pressed the NeoPixels in, and soldered them together. The warm board stick will into the mount, but to be extra safe I slathered the back with some hot glue. ## HOTEND WIRING Because I have the Genius, which has breakout pins for the BLTouch right on the top, I made a little extension for the inductive sensor and plugged it in to the B/R/Y pins of that header. These correspond to GND/5V/Control for the BLTouch servo, and so it's essential that the inductive sensor be connected appropriately. In my case, I needed to connect them to the B/R/Y pins. ## FIRMWARE CHANGES My firmware is full of all sorts of randomness, so I won't post it here. But here's what you need to change on 3DPrintBeginner's firmware for the inductive Z probe mod to enable the NeoPixels: COMMENT OUT: ``` #define RGB_LED ``` UNCOMMENT: ``` #define NEOPIXEL_STARTUP_TEST #define NEOPIXEL_LED ``` SET: ``` #define NEOPIXEL_PIN 5 #define NEOPIXEL_PIXELS 4 ``` On mine, I also uncommented `#define NEOPIXEL_IS_SEQUENTIAL` for MAXIMUM RAINBOW, but if you want to have them all change color together, you can leave that commented out. Finally, depending on the exact NeoPixels you're using, you might need to change `#define NEOPIXEL_TYPE`. ## Sidewinder X1 Considerations You should be able to use this as a starting point to add both the inductive Z probe and the neoPixels to the stock Sidewinder X1, using just the RGB LED header on the hotend. To do this, you'll need to dedicate two of the R/G/B pins to the probe and NeoPixel I/O, the other to 5V for both, and also split the GND pin for both. Then, on the motherboard side, you would need to split the 3-pin brown wire harness up to have 1 pin connect to 5V and the other two to the appropriate digital IO pins. GND should be handled in the ribbon connector.