Build your own LED controller for under $6 with WLED

hi welcome to resin chem tech do you like led lighting obviously i do now this is a little bit crazy and over the top but this can be toned down and used just for ambiance lighting but if you're interested today i'm going to talk about how you can build your own led light strip controller for a little less than six dollars and about an hour hour half of your time it'll have thousands of colors and hundreds of different effects that you can use anywhere in your house so stay tuned [Music] so a little bit over the top if you thought so my wife would not disagree with you so why would you want to build your own light strip controller when you can buy ones that come with a remote control well the one thing is this remote control is going to be somewhat limited in terms of the effects and how you set it and in all honesty i haven't had a lot of luck with these ir remotes you've got to get them really close to the transmitter so the one we're going to build not only will be available over wi-fi but of course we're going to be able to integrate that into home assistant control it and use it for automations talk about the parts the assembly and putting wled on our controller okay here are the parts we're going to need to build our wled controller now note that there are a lot of different options different ways to accomplish this same thing this is the way that i build mine and i build it primarily to be as small as possible and as reliable as possible but the first thing we're going to need is an esp8266 board in this case i'm using the wemos d1 mini if i get that up here and get it focused again i like this for the small size reliability and honestly we're only going to use two well one and optionally two pins other than the three volt five volt and ground three point three volt in ground so you know a bigger board with more pins is really not needed in this particular case the other option or not an option but the other thing we're going to use here is a logic level shifter and get that up there and we can see that so what it will do is it will take the 3.3 volt signal that comes out of the d1 mini and shift it up to 5 volts the reason we need to do that is even though the d1 mini runs off of 5 volts the output of the pins are only 3.3 volts and our w or our led strip ws 2812b expects a 5 volt signal in now you can get away with using the 3.3 volt signal if you have the strip installed very very close to your controller the 3.3 volts is barely enough to go ahead and send that signal through but if you're going to have any kind of distance in there you're going to need to boost that signal to 5 volts there is an alternative to using this logic level shifter although i will say that the logic level shifter will cost you about a dollar um and it's a much more reliable way and it can actually output multiple channels get back over there get that focused so in this case i think it's four channels five channels four channels that you can can shift up but the alternative is to simply take a single pixel from one of your strips cut that pixel off and use this as your logic level shifter so we would install a single pixel really close to our board and we would run our five volts and our signal through this and then we would run out to the rest of our led strips so that is an option it does require a little bit more soldering in the wled software you can actually disable this first pixel if you want to do it that way and of course you know you can go with a full nodemcu esp8266 board but again that's going to make our overall size much bigger the goal here is when we're done we're going to mount this on electro cookie prototype board which will allow us just enough room to mount our control board and our logic level shifter and then that will then fit into this small 3d imprinted closure if we end up going with the node mcu which again is really kind of overkill we don't need all these additional gpio pins but if we do that we have to move up to a bigger board and a bigger enclosure so just for comparison sake here are the two different sizes and by using the wemos d1 mini we can significantly make a much much smaller controller and of course there are some optional items you're going to need obviously some wire i recommend either some spade connectors or you can use these jst connectors you can directly solder everything right from your board right to your led strip but i like to it makes installation much more difficult so i do like to have connectors where i can can build my controller install my leds and then basically connect everything together another option i like to use is a push button a simple normally open push button wled contains has the ability to control the lights locally so i have the ability to turn the lights off and on change effects uh single press double press long press so i like to call install what i always call a muggle button a way to control the lights locally through a button button push without the need to even use any kind of automation so i will show how we install that as well i think that's it for the parts so obviously we have to solder these pin connectors or pin headers onto these boards that is one advantage of the node mcu is it comes with the the pin headers already installed but you sacrifice that for the size and uh but you do save yourself a little bit of soldering but this is a really good project if you're not really excellent at soldering this is a really good project to kind of hone your soldering skills because it really is pretty simple so we'll take a look at that next okay the first thing we need to do is we need to solder our pin headers onto our wemos d1 mini and our logic level shifter now note that because again we're trying to keep this small and due to the size of this electro cookie there's not quite enough room for all six of the pin headers on the logic level shifter so we'll actually just be using the five pins five most innermost pins but also note that you want to assure that you've got the low voltage side on the same side as the 3.3 volt on the d1 mini and the high voltage side on the same side as the 5 volt so again we're going to break pins off and we're not going to solder a pin on this very first channel of the logic level shifter but that's fine it still leaves us three other channels that we can use now i found the easiest way to solder these headers onto here and assure that your your pins stay straight because you notice there's some play in there is to simply use a breadboard so we're just going to insert the pin headers into the breadboard make sure we get those lined up right and again for this we only want to use five so we're going to count one two three four five we're going to break off the pin headers there and we'll stick those in here and then five for the other side one two three four five break those off five over here now we can drop our boards on top of these pins well except i got one row one row off there it's kind of important to make sure you get the right spacing between those there we go we'll drop those on there again drop this on here making sure that we're leaving this last pin blank and then we just start soldering oh first of all i'm going to turn on my exhaust fan it's important to make sure you have an exhaust fan i've got myself a little home built exhaust fan here made from an old uh pc fan and believe it or not this is another uh wled install it actually gives me some extra lighting here so all right let's start soldering i do like to use a little bit of a no clean flux i find this just makes things a little bit easier to solder so we're just going to apply a little bit of flux to these pins and then we'll take our soldering iron and get started so while i'm fast forwarding through some soldering here i want to uh make an editorial opinion that you know i've opted not to monetize my channel of course i'm not eligible yet but one thing i like the fact that i don't get ads on my videos but youtube has changed their terms of service and reserve the right to serve ads on any videos so if you're seeing as before during or after my video i apologize it's out of my control and i receive no income from that so just be aware that i have no control over these ads there we go again no pin on that last piece so now we just pull these out of there and you'll notice our pins are nice straight and aligned and they're now ready to fit directly on to our prototype board this is the wiring diagram we're going to follow now note that the electro cook cookie mini board does have the advantage of having columns connected on each half of the board but unlike a full breadboard it doesn't have a power rail on each side and since we're going to need multiple ground connections and power connections we're going to have to solder some additional connections in these columns which will be underneath the mounted esp32 or the d1 mini and the logic level shifter so we're going to do all this wiring on the underside of the board and some of the wiring is going to need to be completed before we solder our logic level shifter and d1 mini to the board and i list down here what i recommend you solder prior to wiring you do prior to soldering the boards on and then after but we're going to have 5 volts coming in from our external power supply and the logic level shifter is going to need 5 volts on one side and 3.3 volts on the other side to shift that signal out to our led strip from 3.3 volts to 5 volts so let's take a look at how we soldered this board okay next we need to solder some jumpers on our board because if you remember from our diagram we're going to use some of these connectors that are underneath the d1 mini so we need to make these solder joints from the bottom of the board and we need to make them before we solder the d1 mini onto the board so i went ahead and cut my jumpers here i'm using 20 gauge solid wire i like to use a solid wire for this just because it's a little bit easier to bend and hold into place so we'll check our diagram here make sure we get everything in the right spot this is going to be our five volt connection to our high side yep and our ground to our logic level shifter and then the ground to the other side it should go right here and get that in there where it belongs there we go so we need to solder these into place before we flip this over and put the d1 mini into place now you can use blue tack you can use a lot of different ways i just like to throw a little masking tape on there to make sure i'm holding these into place so i can flip it over uh the other thing to note here i don't know how well you can see this you want to make sure that these wires are cut fairly short you want them barely protruding through because this is going to mount on top and we don't want the tops of these coming into any contacts with with anything underneath here so you need to make sure that those are short and when this board goes into place masking tape is in the way nothing's going to touch if you get them a little bit too long you can always trim them off but you want to keep these wires coming through here fairly short all right let's solder these into place if you're new to soldering there are lots of youtube videos that will give you tips on soldering the most important thing is a good soldering iron make sure your tip is pretend and flux is your friend so there we are our next step is going to be to go ahead and solder these onto the board but before we do that i like to go ahead and install the wled software onto my d1 mini so in the past until very recently the only way to install wled was you had to go to the github go into the latest releases figure out which binary that you needed download it and then use a third-party utility like esp home tasmatizer or something else on your machine to upload that to your board but just recently air cookie has added a way to to install wled directly from your web browser all you need to do is identify the com port when you plug in your d1 mini and it doesn't show here because it didn't record the pop-ups on this screen but you can go to control panel in windows plug in your board and look to see what com port pops up in my case it happened to be com port 8. so once we know that com port you plug it in simply hit the install button another pop-up is going to ask you to verify the com port you select the one you know and boom it starts installing it's that easy no downloads no third-party utilities nothing like that it's going to install the latest version of wled and it's also going to detect whether you have an esp8266 or an esp32 board so this is is outstanding work makes installing wled much easier and quicker while this is installing i'm going to give a shout out to air cookie that's the handle the developer of wled goes by and if you find this useful he has spent a lot of time developing this and continues to develop this and gives it away for free so if you do find this useful go to the github webpage by the way i'm going to leave links for everything down in the video description to wled also my blog that has all the details for the diagrams and the written uh steps to to create your own controller but uh back to the point go to air cookie's website he has a link at the very bottom of the welcome page and if you can find a way to throw him a few dollars in terms of a donation via paypal please do that those of us who use anything with led strips or home assistant you've heard of wled and error cookie has done such a fantastic job i really would hope that you could support his work by you know throwing him a small donation if at all possible so again this this only takes a few minutes uh maybe uh 60 to 90 seconds total and boom we are installed okay now that we've got wled flashed onto our d1 mini and connected to our wi-fi we're ready to go ahead and solder this and our logic level shifter onto our board so we'll take our board here and if you're following along with the diagram here notice that the first pin here are actually in setup to be in column two of the board here that should line up on the back side our five volt and our grounds lining up right here with pin one and pin two so double check that and then for our logic level shifter should fit right in here and again you notice that we do not put the pins here because they're going to actually going to overlap the board the other thing that you want to check and verify is make sure that the lv or low voltage side is on the same side as a 3.3 volt on your d1 mini and the high voltage should be on the same side as the 5 volt okay so we've got those in place thing is there so i'm gonna use the same technique before i like to use a little uh masking tape here to hold things in place this one there we'll flip this thing over and we'll start soldering [Music] do [Music] okay looks like everything should be soldered on there good take this off and we have a couple more jumper wires to install here we still need to run uh the 3.3 volts out here to the low voltage side of our logic level shifter and we still need to take our actual signal that's going to go out to our leds and run it through the the logic level shifter so again following along with the diagram need one here there this one could be a little bit trickier to run i did that so before gonna go into four here we're actually going to run between the pins under a hole right there a little tape and solder those okay the only thing we've got left to do now is we have to solder our a few leads coming in for our five volts coming in our signal led signal going out to our led strip and optionally and which i'm going to go ahead and do here is a leads to a couple of push buttons so as i fast forward again here through some soldering i want to reach out and ask you the viewer about what kind of videos would you like to see in the future do you prefer these these full 30-minute how-to videos from from start to finish maybe with chapter break so you can jump around or would you rather see the the short highlight you know eight to ten minute videos with maybe a link to a blog post that has the full details uh i'm specifically interested in those of you who have been kind enough to subscribe to the channel i'm a relatively new channel so i'm i'm kind of looking for feedback on what kind of things you know do you want to see me me do in the future if there anything from my smart home tour you want to see more details on please post it down in the description or sorry the comments to this video and let me know okay that finishes all of our soldering so we can turn our fan off here and get rid of that noise take this off everything is soldered together holds good so now what we're going to do is we're going to throw it in our 3d printed enclosure once again as i work to throw this in the enclosure i just want to mention the huge advantage of a 3d printer if you're into diy electronics or home automation i can't emphasize enough the utility of a 3d printer and to be honest the cost of these come down so much if you can see here that the uh you can currently get a 3d printer for as low as 155 bucks and you may even be able to find a better price than that but having these available will make so many of your projects better and of course you can find copies of these kind of things on on thingiverse and you can design your own on tinkercad it's really a great investment and there you go so we've got a wled controller with optional push button control over here our signal wire to our led strip and our five volt power in uh one thing i did want to mention is you could theoretically power this thing off of the usb and not have these leads to your five volt power supply however if you do that you have to run a ground from your five volt power supply that's powering your leds to the ground on this board you have to have a common ground between your board and your led strips or things will things will not work well and be really funky so i usually just go ahead and power this off my five volt power supply it's instead of having a usb cable and have to have a usb plug but that is an option to do that but a lot of people will discover when they do that and power this off usb if you don't have that common ground wire connected to your led strip then all kind of funky things are going to happen and it's just not going to work for you all right put this back together and we're ready to give hook it up and we'll do a quick bench test okay i've tried to clear things off a bit here set up for a bench test it looks a little bit crazy in terms of wiring but again this is just a temporary hookup so real briefly over at the edge of the screen is our five volt power supply we're running again our five volts from our power supply into our controller board we're also running separate five volts uh into our led strip here's our green signal wire coming out of our our control box which is running the signal in on our led strip and then finally is this optional button and we'll give that a test in a minute but we want to make sure we've got nothing touching here and uh we'll plug in the power supply and keep our fingers crossed everything works okay there we go now by default the first time wled starts up it's only going to light up the first 30 pixels in orange and it looks like that's just about where we're at here so what we're going to do now is we're going to go ahead and connect to this and make sure we've got control i'll try to throw this up here on the screen and see if we change the blue let me turn this other light off and see if we can see things a little bit better with not quite so much light there blue we've got red let's try a couple of effects here that's not a very good one i think okay and we'll just go over here real quick into the well you can see this into the config leds and even though there are 300 here we're not power supplies probably not enough for that let's just set it to 100 for now and save let's go back to solid color here yep looks like everything is working so let's test our button by default you can define what these buttons do now looks like we have a problem with the button okay figured out what the problem was with our button this new version of wled actually allows you to define the pin settings and it's a little hard to see here but you actually define it's gonna be hard to see and get focused but you define which pin uh your button is connected to and i hadn't defined that so once i found that setting went in and basically said this is hooked up to d3 which is gpio zero now we push our button we're able to control the lights long double press there we go so our button's working let's turn those back on uh our controls working everything seems to be good to go so we're ready to install this in whatever installation uh we want to use it for so that'll do it for this video if you found it at all useful go ahead and hit that like button to let both me and youtube know that you like these types of videos and if you want to see more of my videos be sure to click that subscribe button down here in this corner and if you want to be notified whenever i release a new video go ahead and click that bell icon right next to it so as always thanks for watching we'll see you soon [Music]

Channel: ResinChem Tech

Views: 93,374

Keywords: WLED, WS2812b, Home Assistant, LED strip lighting

Id: ifv6wV3Rm6A

Length: 26min 48sec (1608 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 01 2021