LED technology has come a long way in the past couple of decades. One of the biggest LED achievements that came along was the invention of blue LEDs. RGB LEDs came shortly thereafter. And now, we’re able to create almost any colour you can think of.
RGB LEDs have made their way into a lot of the lights we use for our photo and video productions. But have you thought about making your own? Instructables user tobychui did, and he’s made the plans available for us to make our own.
DIY RGB LED Light
One of the big advantages of RGB LED Lighting is that it often doesn’t have to be too terribly accurate. Sure, you might want to match another light source in certain conditions, but for the most part, not really.
It just needs to look close enough to the colour you want (red, blue, etc) to sell the effect you want on camera. This is fortunate because most LED modules, particularly RGB ones, aren’t all that accurate at all.
Tobychui’s design centres around the WS2812B LED modules. These are 5v modules containing individual red, green and blue LEDs along with a chip. This chip lets you address each one of those LED modules individually.
This lets you turn on or off individual LEDs and set each LED to whatever colour you want. It’s all controlled using an ESP8266 on a custom PCB designed by tobychui. The back holds the ESP32, the buttons for configuring the light and various other components.
On the front are spaces for the WS2812b LED modules. There are 49 spaces for LED modules in total, resulting in a 7×7 square grid.
The ESP8266 microcontroller not only acts as the brains for the whole thing but also gives it WiFi and Bluetooth capabilities. So, you’re easily able to remotely control the LED light from the browser on your smartphone just by logging onto its WiFi network.
What do you need?
It’s quite a simple list of hardware. And you have a couple of options. If you want an RGB LED strip, you can just buy a Wemos D1 Mini, a USB power bank and a WS2812b LED strip. But if you want to go with actual panels, you’ll need to have the PCB made.
There are several companies that offer PCB manufacturing. Personally, I prefer JLCPCB, but there are other companies out there, too. All you need to do is download the files and then send them off. Besides the PCB, the other component list looks like this:
All in all, not including the cost of shipping your PCBs, comes out to less than $5 per LED light if you shop wisely, buy in quantity and build a few. Buying 5,000 WS2812b LEDs once is a lot cheaper than buying 50 of them 100 times (it’s probably cheaper than buying 50 of them 10 times).
To download the schematics, code, and 3D printable models, be sure to check the complete build log on Instructables.
We’ve shown a few other ways to build LED panels and LED tubes here on DIYP before. So, if you’re not sure which light you want to build yet, be sure to check those out.
[via Hackaday]
