To follow up on yesterday’s post, I made a more permanent 4-channel board for driving an RGB LED strip plus the original white LED strip already in use.

A JeeNode is used to drive these strips, using a small custom JeePlug to hook up ports 1 and 4, as well as to use the LED voltage as power source for the JeeNode:

Here is the plug in more detail:

It includes an LP2950 linear regulator to put 5V on the PWR pin, that way this thing can be used with any input voltage from 12 to 24V. Here is the bottom side:

The driver itself uses four IRLZ34N MOSFETs, three of which will be used for the RGB strip, and the other for the white strip so that it too can be controlled and even dimmed remotely:

The back side is hand-wired using sturdy copper wire, although in this case only 300 .. 600 mA is being switched per color. The 10 kΩ pull-down resistors prevent the lights from turning on in the absence of control signals.

And here’s the completed setup:

The two wires sticking out are for attaching my 12V lab power supply during testing. The other green 2-pin screw terminal is for attaching the white LED strip.

The RGB ledstrips can now be installed next to the LED strips already in use here at Jee Labs:

Here’s a trivial test sketch to turn each of the 4 colors on and off:

The results can be seen in this brief video.

What remains, is to write the software so this thing can be controlled via wireless. I might add an LDR to sense ambient light levels, or even a Room Board. Perhaps some basic ramp-up / ramp-down PWM logic. Or maybe I’ll just duplicate this setup and drive the two sets of LED strips I have, independently and from a single JeeNode.

Hardware is easy, it’s always the software… the code will be presented tomorrow!

Reminders: 1) June discount and 2) Jee Labs will be closed from July 14th to August 14th.