10 Unique WLED Lighting Options! (Neon Rope, FCOB, Fairy Lights, and more)

what's up smart homers my name is Aaron and in this video I want to show you 10 different lighting options for wled that I've been playing with recently starting with this sidey emitting ws2812b LED strip if you look closely at this one you can see that rather than the typical configuration where the LEDs Point directly away from the mounting surface here they point perpendicularly to the surface there's still ws2812 LEDs so they're individually addressable and they work with wed but they're shape different these are cool because they can be mounted to the edge of a desk or the underside lip of a kitchen cabinet and still emit light in a vertical Direction however since the LEDs only Point One Direction perpendicularly you do have to be careful which end is the start and end of the LED strip when you're planning out where to put it just in FYI guys I've left links to all the products we're looking at in the description of this video the next one I want to show you is called an fcob LED strip I think this stands for flip chip chip on board or flexible chip on board I'm not really sure which but either way it's an LED strip with a bunch of tiny very bright LEDs but they're covered by a strip of silicone this strip provides built-in diffusion and really helps hide the individual LEDs making the strip look like a single bar of light you can see that every three LEDs there's a spot to cut the strip but from what I can tell every single individual LED is addressable I decided to use this strip to replace the strip that was on my door frame that I put up in my first ever wed video and I am super impressed by the difference having put this one up this strip provides excellent color blending for some really nice effects and you don't see any darker lighter spots alternating like a marquee sign since the LEDs are so small in this strip compared to your typical ws2812b strip there are a ton more per inch or per foot or whatever and I ended up with over 1100 LEDs around the frame of my door despite how many there were my go-to controller the athm controller was still able to handle them with no issues the listing does say that these are ws2812 BS but they don't look like the typical 50/50 SMD LED that you're typically used to seeing so they're different shape but they work fine in W LED configured as ws2812b I did also pick up an fcob strip that was ws2811 and 24 Vols but since I didn't have a power supply readily available I'm not going to test him in this video but I think it was every three LEDs are addressable together rather than every individual one so I like the 5vt ones better the next one I'll show you is pretty cool it's this neon light strip it's pretty much a WS 282b strip but it's encased in a silicone diffuser that's extremely flexible you can see that the diffuser really helps hide the individual LEDs but they're still noticeable up close another interesting thing is the strip of translucent material on the side allowing some light out there not sure why they do that but it can provide a nice effect if that side of the strip is exposed when you're mounting this wherever you put it I think this strip would look really good on a door frame especially if your trim is white because it really Blends in nicely when it's off and it looks great when you turn it on I'm also considering using this for some lighting on my staircase since I have a nice ledge that this thing could be mounted to one thing I did notice and I guess this is kind of expected with all of the LED strips We're looking at but there was a bit of yellowing when I set this thing to White at the end of The Strip This is due to voltage drop and it means you need to inject power at the other end of the strip if you can another qualification with this strip would be to use a wood router and a chunk of wood to route a certain shape into the wood of the same width and depth of this strip and then you could push this strip down into that Gap and you'd have like this neon glow coming off the wood this is something I may do in the future but right now I don't have a wood router so I can't do it okay this next one is one of my absolute favorites and it's this neon rope light once again it uses a WS 201812 B LED strip inside but the strip is encapsulated in a rubber tube and that tube is sheathed in a fabric that gives it a really cool reticulate pattern and the end is terminated with a silicone cap out of the other end you have the typical wires coming in with a three- pin connector I really like the look of these as they do an amazing job of diffusing that light so it just looks like a rope of light I think this would be great for use in Cosplay or costume design and really any kind of party where you want to have some lighting it comes with these plastic brackets that can be screwed into a flat surface and then you can clip the rope light into those brackets allowing you to shape the Rope just the way you want you can go for neon letters or even just an abstract shape like I did here next we have fairy lights and you may have seen these before I first saw them on a do Z's video a long time ago they're just a bunch of LEDs on a string with some space in between and they're encapsulated in some sort of silicone which diffuses them a little bit and gives them a soft glowy look it also makes them look decent when they're on during the day and they're great for decorating curtains and other draperies and they look really good during the spring or summer when set to a warm white they kind of look like fireflies you can get them in pretty long lengths and even string multiple lengths together but don't forget you'll have to inject power because these are ws2812 BS and they're going to experience voltage drop down the line hey don't forget to subscribe if you're new so you can see more videos like this so this next one is another one of my all-time favorites for wled it's a series of hard plastic balls with LEDs and inside them and the balls act like diffusers when you connect power you can see how amazing they look especially with the lights off where you can really see how the entire ball lights up super evenly these lights are pretty cool because they look a little bit like traditional Christmas lights but just better I hung them up on the railing in my living room and you can see they look really good lights on or off and they give off a nice amount of light of course with wld you can try all these different effects and patterns so my kids had a ton of fun playing with those so this next one is a little bit different it's not in a light strip but it's a little board that allows you to create a kind of firework effect with LED strips it takes the typical three Channel input that individually addressable LED strips have but then it splits them out into a bunch of directions the ones I got split out into 11 directions and you can get them with and without three pin connectors already soldered to it so you can just connect the strips that way without any kind of soldering these are pretty cool and something I might play around with a little bit later but it kind of acts like a duplicator where you can't set different effects for each strip coming off of there it's one effect for all of them next we have some Led rings of various sizes I have to admit I just binge bought a bunch of these cuz I thought they'd be cool and really haven't thought of a great use for them but they are ws2812b LEDs with leads on each end of the segment that's in the ring so that you can easily connect them to a controller they kind of look just like you'd expect when they light up but they're really messing with my camera lens because of the lack of diffusion these could be useful for an RC lamp you might want to build or something like that but I'm not going to really try anything like that I decided to use it with a zigg smart knob I've been messing with with the knob and the wed controller connected home assistant I used the ring as kind of a dial to indicate how much I had turned the knob one way or another maybe this will give you an idea for how you could use these but if you got ideas leave a comment in the comment section next we have these circular LED panels they're actually made up of a bunch of rings like the ones I just showed you but keeping them attached to each other is pretty cool cuz it gives you like this solid Circle you can see that the white one has empty terminals on the back so you can control them in series or in parallel literally solder them however you want the black one has a bunch of leavs attached already with the three pin connectors so this might be handy for someone who doesn't want to have to do any soldering but wants to play around I ended up connecting them all in series and then connecting them to this wed controller and wow that is a lot of light I tested them with a bunch of different effects and while they do do look pretty cool not nearly as cool as the 2D matrices that I played around with previously doing things like pixel art and wld I do plan to add these Circle grids to my pixel art calculator which is an Excel file that I used in a previous video so if I do that I'll leave a link to that sheet in the description so you can check it out I also started trying to make a clock out of these circular panels but I didn't get super far so I'll just show the progress I've got in here and maybe someone can take it and actually make one the next thing is something that a subscriber actually sent to me quite a while ago and it's actually something that they make and sell and they were asking me if I could play around with it with W LED this hexagonal Matrix is super unique with 271 LEDs laid out in HEX shape they're all ws2812b LEDs but it's pretty thoughtfully designed first of all it's very stiff unlike a lot of the 2D matrices we've played with and I think it's important to have a little bit of rigidity second if you look on the back you can see that there are solder pads for inputs and outputs and there also power in ection pads to mess around with this thing I just soldered a spare connector onto the input pads and then connected it to my controller nothing too crazy when I plugged it in I messed around with some of the different wld effects they look kind of cool but I did start working on adding this to my pixel art Creator as well so maybe we can mess around with that and make some cool pixel art I think this definitely could be used to make a artsy clock especially with that hex shape but I just haven't had time to dig into it anyway that's pretty much it for this video I've had a ton of fun testing all these out but it is near the end of the year and I kind of want to finish off with this video there are a ton more products that I saw that I wanted to mess with but they wouldn't all fit in one video so if you're interested in a part two where I cover a bunch more Unique Products let me know and I'll start messing with them I hope this helps you if you're looking for holiday decorations although it's probably too late for that or if you're just looking for some cool lighting projects for the new year if you have any questions again leave a comment and don't forget to subscribe if you want to see more wld videos like this because I want to do a controller comparison next so it should be a lot of fun anyway thanks for watching see [Music] you

Channel: Make It Work

Views: 59,074

Keywords: smart home, tech, home assistant, automation, diy, review, control, device, sensor

Id: eYvrDd8ieTE

Length: 10min 21sec (621 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 22 2023