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Color wash ambient lighting Christmas present

A project log for Use It Up!

Documenting my efforts to use up the various electronics bits and pieces I've collected over the years.

dan-julioDan Julio 12/17/2024 at 04:090 Comments

A long time ago I designed a whole bunch of LED drivers and control systems as part of an ambient lighting system.  The company I started to sell them wasn't successful but I held on to a lot of different prototypes and development boards.  The system was based around a 2.4 GHz wireless protocol.  A typical system might consist of a touchpad based remote control and a receiver/driver driving high-brightness or strip LEDs (all kinds, from white to RGB, RGBA and RGBW).

My partner's daughter lives in NYC and I was trying to think of something to get her for Christmas when I had the idea that her apartment needed some pretty color changing ambient lighting.  So I dug through the stash.

The interesting bits include a 4-channel 350 mA constant-current driver (green PCB), a receiver/controller (white PCB) that connects to it using a flex cable, a 5V 3A supply, a HB RGB LED In a heatsink enclosure and one of the original remotes I designed.

I gutted an old halogen track light fixture and modified it to hold the LED/heatsink.  It had some plastic bits that could be re-used to mount to a 3D printed base. 

A bit of time with OpenSCAD resulted in a simple enclosure that was quickly - well it took 6 hours - printed.  I screwed-up the location of the mounts for the driver board but it worked well enough (no-body is going to see that boo-boo).

Then I thought about the remote control.  It was always a bit clunky and large because it used 4 AA batteries (one of my first embedded designs...).  I decided to hack it a bit so it would run on a USB charger and remain always active.

The guts of the remote consist of a control board and a touchpad originally designed for laptops.  To this I added a USB-C breakouts wired directly to the control board and threw together another 3D printed enclosure.

It all came together very well and I was really pleased with the result.  The fixture can be set to any color/intensity combination (two of which can be memory presets) or set to slowly change colors on its own.

As I write this the fixture is en-route to NYC.  I hope she likes it.

For this project I had everything but a cheap USB charger and 6 foot USB-C cable that I bought from Amazon.  The whole project was completed over the course of three days with a lot of waiting for the 3D printer.

Late addendum

I decided to build up a couple more fixtures.  For these I bought a cheap outdoor light fixture from a hardware store and re-used the globe and part of the globe mount on a 3D printed base.

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