Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Making LED Strip room lighting

Decided to make some adjustable color lights for the walk in closet. Each LED contains independently adjustable red, green, and blue LEDs.

Since one full roll is too long for the room I decided to cut the strip in half and double it up.
There is 4 connectors that needs to be soldered together. 

After I soldered them together I found out the thin copper pad I was soldering the wire too was not attached that firmly to the strip and could peel off. I decided fix that problem by coating the entire area in epoxy to prevent any movement in the soldered area. 







I attached the LED strips to a aluminum one inch square tube with some clear double sided tape, the tube also acts as a good heatsink to keep the LEDs cool.





I let the led strip warm up for a bit before i firmly pressed it down onto the double sided tape. This will prevent the strip from buckling when it warms up and expands.





Looks like it is not bright enough to light up a room this size.





But more than enough light for a walk in closet. In this picture you can notice that the color has been adjusted to a warm while instead of the cool blue white that i was using before. One unexpected result of using the RGB LEDs is that there seems to be a rainbow effect around the LEDs. I think this is because when it is so close to the strip, there is not enough distance for the separate RGB lights to mix properly into white.