16x16 LED Matrix Setup with WLED and ESP32, BEST Enclosure Design!

[Music] good afternoon guys this is my British computer guy here um another video for you so I've been asked a bunch of times after I built my uh 18x 32 Matrix enclosure um if I would make a similar version but for the 16x 16 LED Matrix uh panel so here it is I went ahead and I did it I completed it a couple of days ago so I want to go ahead and share this with you this is uh a version that is not 100% 3D printed um you do require a stencil sheet for this particular build for the diffuser because in my personal opinion it works a lot better than a 3D printed uh diffuser plus also it's the 3D printer diffusers have a tendency to warp when you're printing them um so this is kind of my my compromise but I think this works like this is probably one of the better builds that I've come up with so I want to share it with with you and I also wanted to share some design challenges that uh I I came across in in the build process so let's go ahead and get straight into it uh some of the things you're going to need for this particular project obviously you're going to need the um the enclosure uh it's all 3D printed this took probably about let me see here 5 10 maybe about 20 hours to 3D print it's uh everything has like a 20% infill on it I believe um this was actually the hardest part to print uh and this is one of the main reasons I had some uh challenges with getting this to work correctly uh this here is the the first version of the back that I created now it's kind maybe difficult to see on the camera but uh it's warped um it warped big time this is once again 20% infill uh it's pla just a white pla but as you can see it it it's kind of harder to see because it's it's white but um it's got a real Bend to it the the pla shrunk up after it had finished and kind of made it look pretty bad so not great quality didn't really enjoy that so I had to try and overcome that particular problem so what I figured out was I figured that if I put some ridges on one side of it um you'd be using less material so there'd be less of it to contract so what I did was I came up with this design um as you can see here we have fine ridges all the way through it there's a couple of um lines here which not solid but they got 20% infill uh for support um but this didn't um it did contract ever so slightly on the corner you can kind of kind of make it out there um I think that but I think that was it um it's pretty much flush so when this goes on the back of the unit the the casing it works great um I also decided to go ahead and include the holes for the power buttons so we've got um basically we've got a momentary switch that goes in here which is a it's a 12 mm latching switch uh momentary and then we also have here um a 5.5 MMX 2.1 mm DC power socket um hole and that's these these guys right here um these I mean these are available uh on Amazon they're available probably from AliExpress I'm going to be doing another video here on my findings with AliExpress cuz I've I've had a lot of people commenting in the descriptions uh of my videos and some of the on on the Reddit forums that saying that you know why am I why am I you know sending people to Amazon and oh blah blah blah you you're using pushing affiliate links etc etc yeah they are affiliate links but honestly I really don't make too much money on them um and it doesn't really affect the pr it doesn't affect the price you pay for the product at the end of the day but the reason that the big reason and I'm going to go ahead and get this get into this more in my next video but one of the main reasons that uh I don't particularly care for Ali expresses on certain items you're really not saving very much money um especially when you consider the ship time that it takes to get products to you from China or Korea or whereever wherever they're from um but yeah I'll go into that in more detail later um for this project I am going to be leaving links down in the description below for everything you see here um and I will also try and find them on AliExpress the equivalent so you can kind of compare to yourself and make your own judgment call um cuz the other thing with AliExpress is it takes forever to go ahead and get things uh from AliExpress whereas Amazon typically if you've got Prime subscription or even if you don't have Prime you can get them in a matter of days versus a matter of weeks or months so anyway without further Ado let's go ahead and talk about this further so let say that was the main design floor or design not necessarily a floor but issue that I came across was the back plate for the unit um I've seen a lot of these that don't actually have back plates they just basically have something that looks like this um that kind of goes in there to hold the LED panel in place and then they mount the uh ESP 32 chip somewhere on the back so I'm trying to make the best of both worlds I want a nice neaten enclosure with a back so it's all looks kind of professional looking okay so we're going to go ahead and put this together and I am going to use wo connectors for this particular build um honestly when I go ahead and do this for the final project I'm actually going to be doing so I'm I'm going to solder it all but this is just for time sake so anywhere you see a wo connector you can pretty much do a solder joint okay now the this is the material that we're using for the diffuser and you can kind of see there it's it's fairly it is fairly opaque um you can kind of still see through it a little bit uh which is perfect and this stuff is actually super perfect for Led uh diffusion especially kind of when it's kind of close to the LED itself um this is this is going to be about 10 mm off the the actual LED panel uh but as you'll see in the final pictures in the final video uh that it looks and it works really well now my 18x 32 project we did use two sheets of this um but I'm actually going to be using one sheet of this this particular project because I think one sheet works just as well as two so okay so we started out with the the housing okay uh simple housing it's got a bit of a lip on it to keep the uh LED all the components in place so nothing falls out the front and also I if you can kind of see here but there is actually a little Groove above it um between the the lip and the actual side and the reason I've done that is and I did this on my 8X 32 Matrix panel as well on that build but I wanted to give giveit give a bit of wiggle room on the actual uh for the the gel sheet for the stencil sheet so that it could have a if I didn't cut it exactly right I could still go ahead and Whittle it down to get it just right without it being too narrow because that's only literally the the lip there is probably about 2 mm all the way around um obviously there's no groove on this side or this side it's just just on these sides here so this side it's going to have to be I think it's 161 mm uh on that side you've got up to 162 163 mm and you can kind of trim it down from there if you need to um but anyway so that was that so the first thing that we wanted to do is we wanted to go ahead and put in the the grid okay uh 3D printed Grid it's about 160 mm by 160 maybe just a hair more uh and obviously with contraction um it did reduce it a little bit so it's probably bang on around about 160 let me take a look here real quick yeah it is 160 I would say .5 mm okay uh Square now one thing you'll notice on this you'll you'll notice there are little indentations on this particular grid and the reason for that and I slightly it's slightly off center uh it's not banging in the center and I say the reason for this is if you look at the Led Matrix itself you'll notice that there is actually a very small resistor between each LED and when you when you print a a grid like this if you don't put an indentation on there and you push it on it's going to it has a tendency to catch on the on the resistors and it becomes not flush and I want to get this as flush as possible so uh what I did was I put an offc Center notch on there to um compensate for that little resistor okay all right so putting this together pretty straightforward pretty simple we just take the the base the outer chassis let's go ahead and get the diffuser in there that just sits in there like so okay and perfect perfect fit hardly any wiggle room on that whatsoever okay then we drop in the diffuser grid and and then we drop in the LEDs say there's a tiny little little bit of wiggle room on there which is fine nothing to be concerned about it's not going to affect the performance of the unit at all okay all right next this is the uh kind of a retainer plate it basically applies pressure all over the uh back of the LED Matrix and pushes it up against the grid which in turn P pushes it up against the diffuser panel and this basically just sits in here like so and in my final build I'm actually going to be cutting off these jst connectors and these wires and resoldering on some 18 gauge um wire okay now this does stand a fraction of a millimeter proud of the The Edge which is absolutely fine because the idea is we want this to go ahead and apply a bit of pressure to push everything down and make it all snug okay but before we get into that let's go ahead and get get the chip in there okay so you do need an esp32 chip or an esp8266 uh the one I'm using here is this is my trusty old demo chip that I've been using for a while now this is an ESB 32 um it's pre-loaded with the wed software and if you want to know how to go ahead and do that check out the uh other video in the the link down below uh that I did on how to flash uh wed to your ESB 32 chip okay so now the mounting holes that you'll see on here are specifically designed with the this part this this esp32 chip in mind this is a fairly generic esp32 once again I'll put a link to all these down the description below um but it should match up with your holes exactly uh and to go ahead and secure that I'm going to be using some brass uh brass screws these are number twos they're 38 in number two brass screws if you can see that there and there Philips head okay or posy Drive I don't how what you call it over here um but yeah just wanted to go and secure those in there and there is actually I did leave a gap below if you can kind of see that there um for the wires to exit out a lot of the builds I've seen don't have that so that was something else I wanted to build into this okay so that will just go ahead and pop in here like so I just want to screw that down and I would always use posy dry for these if you use the Flathead ones um you run the risk of the screwdriver slipping out and damaging the electronic circuitry as I found out the hard way a while ago when I when I first started doing this these should be just the right size not to go ahead and interfere with the the buttons on the esp32 so if you need to reflash or anything like that you you can do now for this this particular build what I'm going to do is oh okay looks like my 3D print just broke underneath I might have to go ahead and increase the thickness of these uh these posts underneath the chip so if you see that that's spinning it just basically snapped off so I wouldn't overtighten these um honestly you really only need two to hold it in place securely four is a bit Overkill but I was going to use four I had four might as well use four all right so I'm not going to do power injection on this particular build um I am just going to go ahead and hook up the uh Power and everything to the U the first set of wires on here um when I go ahead and do the final build on this I am going to go ahead and put Power here here and here that way I've got three points of power injection okay that way I can get a nice good bright even brightness throughout the throughout the uh Matrix to connect all these together for saving time I am going to be using um wo my good old favorite wo connectors so what I'm going to do is first of all we want to go ahead and put that to the side I'm going to go ahead and use the the power buttons and the power port so this is just a regular momentary switch pretty inexpensive I think it's a 12vt one but it works at 5 volts just as adjust as well pops on there like so and that screws on the back like so okay okay then we do the same with the the power plug now these power plugs when you buy them you can either buy them pre pre-soldered or you can buy them U bare that basically they don't have any wires attached to them the ones I purchased these were bare and I did actually go ahead and solder on um some some uh 18 gauge wire on these and I do also went ahead and heat shrinked on the back on on the on the the bare ends down here the so joints just to make sure they didn't short out or anything there we go so as I say yeah you can just use a regular wo connector to connect all this stuff if you want to and you don't have to solder it I just like to solder it because it makes it a little bit more secure in my opinion even though wo connectors are very secure they work really well um one one thing you may have to do is you'll probably have to bend these pins just slightly out the way um not from the circuitry but mainly just so there's enough room for the wires to get down in there we we'll give it a try here in a second let's take a look at this no no don't need to okay that's good all right so to hook this up we got the power coming in and we're going to hook that up to the the negative of the switch there using a two-way wo connector that way when you hook this up we know that's positive we still know that's the Earth or the negative okay next we're going to go ahead and hook the let's take a look what we got here power in negative all the negativ want to go together so we want take the negative from the chip the negative from the LED strip so let's use a three-way on here and the white cable from your esp32 is typically always your negative trim that back a little bit and this stuff is really thin gauge wire it's probably like 22 gauge that ships on these J with these jst connectors I really don't much like it I'm going just take that and bend that over just a little bit make make it feel a bit thicker and we're going to go ahead and plug that one in to our next negative power now you could also power these with just a USB power cable plugging directly into the uh esp32 however I wouldn't recommend that because there's 256 LEDs and um it's you're not going to have enough power you can only really push like an amp through this without without frying it so I wouldn't do that okay so little negatives hooked up we need to hook up the the the positive and we also need to hook up the the data so we take another three-way wio connector let's do the positive so let's hook that one to there give a bit of a tug make sure it's on there okay and then we want to go ahead and hook up the positive from the es32 okay and we want the positive from our switch Okay so now that should be everything we just need to go ahead and hook up the data and then that will be good to go so let's go ahead and hook this up here and this one here use a two-way wo connector for that that and so you can see the difference between um 18 gauge versus 22 gauge so if you if you can see that there's quite a big difference okay so everything is hooked up nicely we have we going to have power coming in here goes to the switch switch is going to feed the positive through here to this connector which is going to power the esp32 and the LED panel then we also have the ground everything is grounded to the same ground point on the esp32 and also the the switch all right and what we have to do is put it together and plug it in turn it on [Applause] okay and to go ahead and screw the back panel on I'm actually using a number four uh number four half in Philips head screws um nice and small these are just regular metal ones they're not brass um so the reason I'm using brass on the chip is because they the only ones I could find of that size that were that were I couldn't find the regular steel ones unfortunately or the galvanized ones of that size okay so now we have it all together we have to get the power to it okay so that's the unit finished nice and look looks nice and defined on the grid no play in that whatsoever just it's great looks perfect back and you will see there is a little bit of a bow in here and I think that is partially to do with a case as well that might be a little bit have a bit of a warp in it but that's really I mean I can live with that versus what I could live with on the other one okay now to go ahead and power this um I did create uh my own little dongle um I'm using a uh 5.5 mm time uh 2.1 mm power socket or should say plug however you want to call it uh to a USB a connector and they're pretty easy to wire um I've actually done it one of my other videos this is a pre-wired pigtail um it comes with two wires they're 18 gauge um and you get um they're also pre-soldered so you got some they're also pre-tinned and all I did was I actually took the positive out of this and hooked it up to the center pin on the socket sorry on the plug and then the negative went to the outer sheath of the uh the plug okay so to go ahead and power this up we're going to go ahead and use a my trusty old uh Inu power bank that I love this is absolutely great um only has 11% battery left on it so we we should be a fairly quick demonstration but all I'm going to do is plug this into the um usba a port and plug this into the socket on the back turn it around and press the on button and the reason they're not coming on the by default is because there's a setting in wed where you can actually tell it not to turn on the uh panel right away as soon as you apply power so basically I have a lot of power outages here if I had the power coming on every time I had a power outage uh anytime they lost power and they regained power all my lights would keep coming on and going off it would be it's annoying so I I I default them M off so let's go ahead and get into this and I'll show you what settings you have to change in wed to make this work but uh yeah so this is 200 56 LEDs to go ahead and do this and power this I would say to to its fullest potential you're going to need at least probably a 15 amp power supply uh it's 0.06 milliamps per LED or per pixel so 256 pixels time 0.06 it's 1536 amp is what you would need to power that uh completely on maximum brightness to maximize the output of that uh particular unit now obviously my little portable power supply isn't going to be able to go ahead and crank that much power out at all uh tops it's probably pushing out maybe 2 and 1 half amp so we're not going to get anywhere near to close to full brightness but it works uh quite well in a in a dim room even in a fairly well lit room you'll see so um but yeah I think you can get a 12 amp power supply which will work quite nicely for this doesn't necessarily have to be 15 amps uh 15 amps is great if you uh you know if you if you're wanting to go ahead and you know get full brightness but 12 amp is more than enough because it's not like you're going to be running these on full white all the time each pixel so it's going to it's only going to require a lot less than uh 15 amps you probably only use a maximum around about 12 amps anyway all right so let's go ahead and get into the wed software okay so first thing you want to do when you've got your everything everything's connected and set up and youve got your power applied to your esp32 via the uh your power supply you want to go ahead and go to your phone or tablet or other device and you want to find the wireless network that says W leed-ap click that if you've not signed in before it will ask you for a password uh if you're not sure what the password is the default password for wed is w1234 okay so once you're in there go ahead and go to the controls and you want to go to config so while you're in config you want to go to uh first things first you want to go to LED preferences right now it's set a total of 30 CU that's the default we've got 256 that we're going to try and light up so we're going to go ahead and change the length to 256 and hit save next we want to go to 2D configuration and we're not using a 1D strip 1D strip is like the tape lights that we have in a lot of our other projects this is going to be a matrix so we want to change that to 2D Matrix and then all we get thist piece of information so we got a couple of things to change here now remember what I was telling you about uh determining where that first led was on your panel um look at your panel and look at the Sur the little white symbol surrounding the F those LEDs looks like an SD card if it looks like it's it's in a position to be inserted into something then the top left is going to be your uh first led so top left is correct we don't need to change that serpent INE is not horizontal it's going to be vertical and it is Serpentine so make sure you've checked Serpentine okay and the dimensions defaults to 8 by 8 this is actually going to be a 16x 16 and that's all you need to change in there it save go back go to controls and power it [Music] on there we go all right so now we want to go ahead and try some of the effects just to make sure everything's working correctly let's go to the aim or Akim and there he is and we can go ahead this like obviously there's a lot of different uh effects that you can do and that's pretty much it you've configured it it's good to go you can put it on a shelf and if you want to know how to get all kinds of different pixel art on here then go ahead and check out my other video uh I'll leave a link in the description down below to that uh so you can see how to uh create your own animated gifs yes gifs not gifs gifs uh as much as I hate saying it it's called a gif but anyway thanks for watching if you like this kind of content please do uh leave a like uh hit the Thumbs Up Button definitely subscribe if you're not subscribed got more content coming soon as I say I'm going to be doing some um a talk about maybe may even do a live chat or a live stream about AliExpress and the benefits and cons of using AliExpress as a supplier for some of these led projects um and also I'm going to be making a giant yes a giant LED Matrix so stay tuned for that so that should be uh I'm going to do a complete walkthrough build all the way from making actually making it to actually programming the software so keep an eye out for that that'll be coming up soon but once again thanks for watching guys in the meantime I'll leave you with some cool effects and uh you all have a great day take care now cheers bye [Music] a [Music] a [Music] n

Channel: mybritishcomputerguy

Views: 10,247

Keywords: matrix, enclosure, arduino enclosure, raspberry pi enclosure, pixel design, adafruit led matrix, rgb matrix, matrix led, dot matrix, wled matrix, wled setup, tidbyt setup, wled and homeassistant, wled and led, wled matrixes, pixel art digital picture frame, rgb-matrix, idotmatrix, wled matrices, esp32 tutorial, matrixpiortal, espressif esp32 wroom, tidbyt the retro display, tidbyt: the retro display, retro, espressif, wt32-eth01

Id: lEbOwCG321g

Length: 27min 12sec (1632 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 19 2024