After the problems with level shifters (see “First Adafruit NeoPixel Blinks with the FRDM Board“) I received the ordered 74HCT245N. Put it on a bread board, wired it up, … only to find out that the device gets very hot… turned off power, and realized that had the device put in with a wrong orientation 😦 oh darn! That’s why I always order things like that in quantities of 3 or more :-). Corrected the mistake, and things are running (or blinking) again 🙂
74HCT245 Wiring for WS2812
With the 74HCT245, I have now both the WS2812(S) and WS2812B running successfully. Further I have tuned the DMA/PWM timing and upated the software project. As an example application, I’m running a simple clock on the Adafruit 60-Pixel ring.
Video of the first draft clock software running: white are the hour marks, green is the hour, blue the minute and purle is the second indicator.
The project and sources for Eclipse Kepler are available on GitHub here.
Happy Clocking 🙂
MCU on Eclipse 
It’s comforting to hear that putting IC’s in wrong orientation does happen to others also, not only me 🙂
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I soldered down a 9S08DZ60 MCU once with the surface mount package rotated 90 degrees on the board. A lot of swearing resulted.
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That happened to me once too, but for me it was a 144 pin QFP and I had it 180 degree wrong. Lots of swearing too 🙂
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You are definitely not alone. I sweared that I checked the IC orientation. That IC has a BIG marker on the opposite side of pin one which comes from the package manufacturing. The pin one marker is a tiny notch. lesson learned: watch out for the tiny things first.
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Ordering at least two more components than I need has saved me a great deal of time as well. But, on occasion, even that has not been enough. 🙂
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The level shifter is now discontinued by NxP, but http://www.nxp.com/products/logic/transceivers/74HCT245D.html the replacement, which is surface mount
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74HCT245 in DIP package is still widely available. Lots of companies made/make those.
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