Marcel Brouwers
For this project we created a custom PCB using the Fritzing software and ordered it at a PCB manufacturing house. The 2 layer PCB is made to fit perfectly on top of the Pi Zero.
We could have used an ordinary LM7805 voltage regulator for powering the
Pi Zero. However we chose for a buck converter as a drop-in replacement
for the LM7805 mainly to limit heat buildup and improve power
efficiency.
On the Raspberry Pi zero we installed Raspbian Jessie Lite and configured the usb wifi dongle to connect to our wireless network. Then we installed pi-blaster and tested pins 17, 27 and 22. After that we installed lighttpd and php. Then we used the bootstrap framework as basis for the webpage used to control the ledstrip. We added the code on GitHub so you can directly clone the files to the /var/www/html directory of your pi zero.
zEhacks005
Simon
Hi Marcel. Nice job with the board, I got some similar transistors a long time back with a mind to do something similar (i.e. drive LED strips with a raspberry pi) but was put off by someone online noticing that the transistors were supposed to take 5v at the trigger input and therefore something something... have you noticed anything screwy like excess heat or low brightness or whatever? Was I being a worrywart or would it be noticeably improved by putting in other little transistors to activate the main ones?