Cheap LED Lighting

[bonehead]

Any chance of posting a video of what they look like as I am about to do the lights in my barn.
Cheers.
Steve

 

[chadsarcade]

OK, just to bring this thread back up again...

My 10m kit turned up mid-week. Initial reaction to the LEDs was great but the remote didn't work. Not a great start but eBay seller sent a new one out which arrived today.

I'm not really liking the fact that you can really see all the individual lights, even when not looking at them directly but I guess that's the trade off for not buying the 300/5m lights and instead going for 150/5m and the lower power consumption. I don't think theres much I can really do about that as diffusers are available but cost a fortune!

But anyway, that aside, I still have another problem. The colours come out nothing like on the remote. And from what I can tell it's because the red isn't as bright as the green and the blue. It's not the LEDs themselves, well unless both reels have exactly the same issue.

Anyone else got that problem? I can probably get round it since I bought the 44 key version so I can program up my own colours but I'm tempted to open up the little white box and see if I can alter the value of a resistor. It'll all be surface mount though so won't be easy.

I've got 300/5m warm whites under kitchen cabinets lighting the worktops. Looking directly at the strip you can clearly see the individual LEDs, but the light on the worktop is nice and even.

Similarly, I have 150/5m RGBs on top of the cabinets facing the ceiling (about 4-6 inches away). There's no way to see the LEDs directly, the colour thrown off the ceiling is nice and even. I suppose if you have the strip mounted right next to a wall you may see an individual "beam" on the wall from each LED close to the strip but it's not a problem I've experienced in my setup.

I haven't noticed red being a different intensity to the other colours, but I noticed each colour will remember its own brightness setting when set on the remote though so it may be worth selecting pure red and hitting the brightness button to check its on full.

I agree the colours on the buttons of the remote don't match what you see, I half expected this though seeing as the parts come from different manufacturers. The colours look different at different times of day anyway depending on the ambient light so it doesn't really bother me.

I may end up getting one of those "touch wheel" colour controllers you can mount on a standard light switch box or something similar. Having a remote seemed like a good idea at the time, but I'm thinking it may get mislaid!

 

[guddler]

Well, today I put one half of the lighting up in the living room. I have to say, I'm not loving it. The best white I can get is awful. It's a murky green or blue (either) at best. Nothing like the normal kind of light you'd have in a living room. The MRs seems to think they'll be alright when I've done the other side too but I'm not so sure

The brightness setting of the red isn't going to make any difference I don't think as the brightness buttons don't do anything at all on the DIY colour buttons.

 

[Kevlar]

I have 10m of 5050 RGB ( 300 LEDs ) strip mounted underneath and up the back of 4 pinball machines so far with a 6a psu and the 44 key remote. I really like how it looks but the one thing that's slightly disappointing is the fade time isn't slow enough for me when left to fade between colours even after slowing it to its slowest. I mostly leave it on one colour as a result.

 

[chadsarcade]

The white generated by the RGB strips isn't anything like normal/natural white light, hence the plethora of warm white/cool white strips for general purpose lighting. However, these are one colour only so no other fancy colours. I use the RGB purely for a bit of added colour rather than to replace other everyday lighting.

In DIY mode the only buttons that seem to work are the R, G and B arrow buttons, but on normal mode the red certainly seems just as bright as green and blue on mine.

I really wish the fade was much, much slower too, this is what I usually have it set to if not a static colour. The other effects seem to be pretty useless for domestic unless you enjoy migraines.

Maybe a custom controller is the way to go, I did look briefly at some RasPi projects but that seems a bit sledgehammer/nut. Any PIC/Arduino/whatnot folk in the house...?

 

[guddler]

I've done loads with Arduino. I can look when I get some time. I'm off on holiday in a week and the list of things to do before then is huge as it is! I realise that the RGB will never be as good as a dedicated single while colour, I was just hoping to get it do that it's better than I've managed so far. TBH, at the moment they annoy the tits off me!

I've just ordered up all the bits needed to do the other side of the room. I'll investigate the custom controller after that. Would be good to be able to control it via Arduino as that opens up all sorts of options for computer based control. My concern is that if we're talking about replacing that little white box then we're talking about dealing with 6A !

 

[RGP]

Any PIC/Arduino/whatnot folk in the house...?

Hello!

Working on exactly this with Luke but a bit more larger scale. He got me switched on to Arudino when he said he could make a device with a pair of relays that I could attach to the door opener and the gate opener at my development so I could give certain people an app that could release the gate/door instead of the hassle of ring up, wait for me to find the keys, press button, wait for them to park, wait for them to come to entry door, buzz, release door - valuable game playing time taken here!

We talked about using the PWM's on the Arudino, Luke started on hardware and i've gone onto software, the result we're looking at involves an ethernet shield, inter-communication, PWM pins and a mini transformer to control multiple banks of RGB LEDs, lightswitches, power switches etc from a single app (Android and iOS versions being written).

I've written an RGB mixing/fading routine that you can step-program your own scene changes if you want but mostly the idea of set the colour to what you want and store it and recall a number of different settings at once (eg one button turns on all the RGB LEDS to a calming warm colour at 50% brightness while switching some sockets on, maybe some overhead GU10 style lamps etc from one command).

We put the project down for a little while to do much more interesting arcade related stuff but am hoping to get back onto this very shortly.

Love to work with anyone on this.

 

[trm]

I've got a few of those ridiculously overpriced Philips globe lights that I really like and had the idea of building some huge versions. I used piranha RGB LEDs and Arduino to control them - the PoC versions were direct drives from the Arduino and some shift registers but I'll add in some chunky transistors for the final version.

When I last hacked on it I'd got code to cycle, fade, pulse, chase etc and it worked pretty well. I realised (well suspected but not yet proved) that light and colour perception is a logarithmic function rather than linear response so I'd started to modify my code to give log stepping but I don't think I finished that before ADHDing onto something else.

But what I did get working made me confident the idea and platform is completely viable. I think I shot some YouTubes so will try to find the account and links.

 

[guddler]

[EDIT] Yeah, right - scrub that last one. It would blow the Arduino to hell and back!!
guddler2013-09-30 12:33:29

 

[RGP]

Luke used a PNP/NPN pair to get around this with the foresight of the current draw.

 

[guddler]

This does the job very nicely and uses 3 x TIP31 + 3 x resistors.
http://makezine.com/projects/android-arduino-led-strip-lights/

Would need to check the current capability of a TIP31 and adjust accordingly if it can't cope with 2A, and then of course you wouldn't want phone control (well, I wouldn't anyway) so some other method of control needs to be devised. Or for me, probably just a few preset colours, selectable some way.

guddler2013-09-30 12:44:35