The LED Node uses MOSFETs to drive the red, green, and blue LED strings, respectively.

Here’s the circuit (note that the LED strips must also include current-limiting resistors):

Well… in the LED Node v1, input pin B and resistor R2 are missing, and R1 is 10 kΩ.

This leads to a fair amount of electrical trouble – have a look:

The yellow line is the input, a 6V signal in this case (not 3.3V, as used in the LED Node). The blue line is the voltage over the MOSFET. The input is a 1000 Hz square wave with 20% duty cycle, i.e. 200 µs high, 800 µs low.

When the input voltage goes low, the N-MOSFET switches off. In this case, I don’t use an actual LED strip as load, but a 1 Ω power resistor, driven from a 2V power supply line to keep the heat production manageable during these tests. So that’s 2 A of current going through the MOSFET, and when it switches off that happens so quickly that the current simply has nowhere to go (the power supply is not a very nice conductor for such high-frequency events, alas).

As you can see, this signal ringing is so strong in this case, that the voltage will overshoot the power supply by a multiple of 2V.

Here are the leading edge (MOSFET turns on & starts to draw 2 A) and the trailing edge (MOSFET turns off & breaks the 2 A current) of that cycle again, in separate screenshots:

The horizontal time scale is 1 µs per division.

The vertical scales are 0.5 V and 5 V (!) per division for the input (yellow) and MOSFET voltage (blue), respectively. Note the 30V overshoot when turning that MOSFET off!

This has all sorts of nasty consequences. For one, such high frequency signals will vary across the length of the LED strip, which will affect the intensities and color balance.

But what’s much worse, is the electromagnetic interference these signals will generate. There’s probably a strong 5..10 MHz component in there. Yikes!

There are various solutions. One is to simply dampen the turn-on / turn-off slopes by inserting a resistor in series between the µC’s output pin and the MOSFET’s gate. If you recall the schematic above, I switched the output signal to pin B, made R1 = 1 MΩ and R2 = 1 kΩ. Here’s the effect – keeping all other conditions the same as before:

What a difference! Sure, the flanks have become quite soft, but that ringing has also been reduced to one fifth of the original case. And those soft flanks (about 2 µs on the blue line) will probably just make it easier to dim the LED strips to very low levels.

The little hump at about 1V is when this particular MOSFET starts to switch – these units were specifically selected to switch at very low voltages, so that they would be fully switched on at 3.3V. This helps reduces heat generation in the MOSFETs – an important detail when you’re switching up to 2 Amps. And indeed, the STN4NF03L MOSFETs used here don’t get more than hand-warm @ 2A – pretty amazing technology!

The new LED Node v2 will include those extra resistors in the MOSFET gate, obviously. And that 1 kΩ value for R2 seems just about right.

The other resistor (R1) is a pull-down, it only serves to avoid unpleasant power-up spikes – by keeping the MOSFET off until the µC enables its I/O pins and starts driving it.

In case you’re wondering about the ringing on the yellow input trace: there’s something called the Miller effect, which amplifies the capacitance between the drain and the gate, causing strong signals on the output to leak back through to the gate. The input signal from my signal generator has a certain impedance and can’t fully wipe them out.

Oh, by the way, have a nice Sinterklaas! :)