I built lights for my lab bench with two goals in mind; 1.) make my bench brighter 2.) bedeck my bench with some snazzy lights. The heart of the project is a strip of RGB LEDs which are controlled by three MOSFETs. The FETs are controlled by an ATMega328P. I've got an ICSP header soldered onto my board so I can update the µC's program at a moment's notice and reconfigure how the controls work, what shade of white the lights glow, or what color changing algorithm the lights runs.
I've been happily using this setup for about a year and a half now and I've decided it's about time I put a proper toggle switch on this project. I cut the power cord to the lights' power supply and added a switch. After drilling a hole in one of my shelves' bracing panels I've got a nice switch!
First I cut strips of LEDs to length, then used the included adhesive to attach them to the shelves. I put two strips on each shelf to get brighter and more even lighting. I soldered the strips together and added a power cable.
The last thing to do was make a long cable with a whole mess of connectors so I could chain all the shelf sections together.
I prototyped the controller on a breadboard. All went well so I threw my prototype onto a piece of stripboard. A few hours later (and a fair share of debugging later) I had my working controller board. Here's the controller on a breadboard.