Building an LED Curtain with WLED

in today's video I'm going to attempt to build a DIY version of a retail product that's been getting a lot of online reviews lately now I'm going to use wled this will be completely local and I'm going to attempt to at least match and maybe even exceed all the features of the retail version so hang around [Music] hi and welcome to resin chem Tech now odds are if you watch Channels similar to mine you've recently seen someone do a review on a new product that's out called gobi curtain LED lights now I don't own these and from the reviews that I've watched they look like a fine product but one of the First videos I watched was one done by Chris Mayer Who does an excellent job with filming LEDs you might want to check out his channel but as I'm watching this video I thought well I think I can build a DIY version of this same thing and by using wlad everything will be local and I think I can duplicate and maybe even add some additional features over the retail version so that's what I set out to do so just a little bit of a warning here this video might be a little more scattered than some of my other videos and that's because I was figuring this out as I went along and wasn't 100 sure how I was going to do some things and I made some mistakes along the way which you'll see but like with most of my projects there'll be a written guide of this entire process now while I'll show some of the parts along the way the written guide will have the complete parts list of everything that I used along with wiring diagrams step-by-step instructions and more should also be aware that if you have sensitivity to Bright flashing lights there will be a lot of that at the end when I show the final product okay with all that out of the way let's get started so let's take a look at the LEDs we're going to be using for this project if you take a look at this picture up here of the Gobi lights and then you look at these they look identical so this looks like it's the exact same type of light at least very similar but there is one major difference one of the subscribers who actually ordered the Govi curtain lights where it was able to give me some information and told me that the spacing between LEDs on the Govi version was exactly three inches if you look at these the spacing between LED is four inches so that is going to mean less LEDs in a given amount of space so we'll see what kind of impact that has but these particular LEDs are from BTF lighting and you'll notice the nice thing here is they are ws2812b so they're the same chip that we're used to using for all of our other LED projects and they do come at 100 LEDs per 5 meter length so I'm actually going to be using four of these for a total of 400 and we'll see how much difference the four inch versus the three inch spacing really makes but we ought to be able to control these just like we do any of our other LED projects so I thought I would start out by filming my idea or my concept here but the idea here is to take some black drain pipe I've got a five foot length here and I've actually cut this not quite in half a little bit more than half and the idea is that we will have one of these the top and the bottom that will add a little bit of weight to keep our strands straight and will also give us a place to hide any wiring for power injection and the connection between our strips now I opted to use this black drain pipe for a couple of reasons one it's much thinner and lighter than standard PVC and which makes it easier to cut and to be honest I like the black color much better than something like this white PVC that I would probably have to try to sand and paint to get it to look decent but the idea is if I have one of these at the top and one of these at the bottom it's going to not only keep my strands somewhat straight but the idea is hopefully I'll be able to roll this up and simply store this when it's not in use so one of the challenges I'm facing that I've got to try and figure out is how do I want to slot or cut this PVC pipe so I can insert my strands so that they're held securely and don't pop out but also so I can easily remove them so I thought about and considering a lot of different ways to cut these slots and luckily I had a couple of scrap pieces that I could play around with but I thought about you know router straight bit I thought about trying to use a slot bed I thought about a jigsaw I thought about you know a hacksaw but the goal here is I want really narrow slots just enough to hold the wires from the LEDs so I don't want these very deep I only want them cut on one side after a little bit of trial and error what I found worked best was one of these cut off wheels on a Dremel I did have to go out and buy the inch and a half because of the three quarter inch just simply didn't give me enough you know I'd have to cut it at an angle for all those this is going to be just enough to allow me to cut these slots oh maybe a quarter to a half inch deep so with that I'm ready to lay out all my marks since there was four inches between each LED pixel by cutting slots about three inches apart it allow me to have 20 strands hanging down with about an inch and a half left over on each end okay the first pipe is cut and at least conceptually it looks like this is going to work fine again these would be long strands of 20 LEDs each and of course when there's a little bit of weight on here pulling these down it ought to pull them down tight I might put a little dab of hot glue on these just to stop them from popping out and still be able to remove them I'll see when I get to the string compartment I think that that's going to work so now I just got to go ahead and cut the other pipe just like this one before I decided to actually string up the LEDs I decided I might want to be able to test them as I went along but to do that I first had to build the controller so I want to cover the parts we'll be using for the controller here I'm going to be using an esp32 in this case not only because of better performance but we do want the option to add sound reactivity here and the sound reactive version of wlad is only supported on the esp32 I'll be adding my normal logic level shifter that I recommend for all LED projects but it's even more important here because we may want to keep that control box some distance away from the start of the LEDs and the farther away you get the controller the more likely you are to have problems with signal strength which is going to cause flickering and misbehaving LEDs so I highly recommend that you use a logic level shifter especially for this project I might try actually using this sn74 buffer gate shifter in this particular project I did a video where I compared these two logic level shifters and really didn't see any performance difference so either one will work or even a sacrificial pixel will work but just because I have some of these laying around I might try using one of these for this particular project now since we're also trying to match or exceed all the functionality of the Govi version the Gobi version has a push button on the controller so we're going to add a push button here but not only will we be able to turn the lights off and on we will actually be able to change colors or effects with this button as I mentioned we're going to be adding a microphone for sound reactivity this is a different microphone that I normally use I'll talk about that in just a minute I have a 5 volt 15 amp power supply that will be running everything and I'm going to add just for the heck of it an IR receiver now you can control wlad through a web browser through home assistant or via the mobile app on your phone but we're going to add this receiver so we can actually have a standalone remote that we can use to control the lights as well and of course we'll have various wiring and wiring connectors that we'll use and you'll see some of those as we go along and of course the blog will have the complete parts list of everything that I use and we're going to mount all this as we always do on the electro cookie prototype board however in this particular case I am going to mount my esp32 on these pin headers that's going to allow me to easily swap out the esp32 between the sound reactive and the non-sound reactive version and the reason I want to do that is because the sound reactive version normally lags a little bit behind the official release so this official wled might have some new features or some new Matrix effects and I want to be able to easily Swap this in and out I can also do that in this particular case because in deference to so many of you out there who've told me you don't have a 3D printer we're going to do this entire Project without using any 3D printed parts instead I'm actually going to use this it's just a simple plastic box and then I'm going to put the power supply in the controller all the connections inside of this box the nice thing about it is it does provide a little bit of weather protection it's not like it's IP67 rated or anything but if you actually have this outdoors and get a little bit of light rain it's at least going to give you some protection another nice thing about this particular box is that I want mine to be portable I want to be able to take it down and store it so if I have any additional mounting components or things like the remote I can actually put that in here and keep all that together so we'll modify this as an example of things that you can do instead of using a 3D printed enclosures I did briefly want to talk about this microphone as I've not used that before in all my previous wled sound reactive projects I've always used the max 9814 this is an analog microphone while this one is digital and this is the inmp441 it actually is the one that's recommended by the sound reactive wled website and being digital it's supposed to give much better performance than the analog version like all my projects I like to run a breadboard test before I create a final soldered version so this is wired exactly the same with all the components here it will be on the final Electro cookie version I went ahead and I flashed the latest sound reactive version of wlad onto my esp32 that way we can test the microphone I've added the IR receiver for the remote control and I've added the push button as well when the microphone is here but you can't quite see it can't quite see it off the screen here you'll see that when I pull back in a minute right now I'm just using one strand of 100 LEDs over here and that would be enough just to let us know that the functionality is working so let me pull back the camera or switch cameras here and we'll plug this in and hopefully everything will be working I just wanted to break in here quickly and mention the installation of wled I'm not going to go into it in detail here I cover it in other videos and it's covered in a lot of other places and their step-by-step instructions on the official wled website check the video description if you really just plug your esp32 into the computer drop down the box and select which version you want to install I'm going to be installing the sound reactive version on one esp32 and the latest version of the standard wled on another controller again I'm not going to cover wlad in a lot of details in this video I'll show a few important points but otherwise check out the official wled documentation for more information okay this might be a little bit better angle here's my power supply and I'll go over all the wiring in a bit more detail later but just know that I am splitting off five volts to run to my controller and a separate 5 volts over here to the LEDs so I haven't configured anything in wled yet so if this works we ought to see the first 30 pixels light up in Orange so cross our fingers plug this in make sure our power supply is on and fail we've got nothing all right well I didn't see any magic blue smoke but I definitely smelt something and this esp32 got really hot really fast so something is wrong here I've got some kind of big fail so I've got a brought back and reevaluate well it didn't take me longer to discover the problem turns out I had reversed my polarity here on the positive and the ground on my esp32 and it doesn't like that and even after I corrected it this is not coming back on so I've fried this board just let that be a little bit of less than I know a lot of times people are scared and yep I screwed up I messed up it happens all the time and so I'm out a three or four dollar esp32 and I'll just have to solder the headers onto another one reflash wled and start over again it's not the end of the world okay I lost about 15 minutes to put uh new PIN headers on a new esp32 and reflash wled and I've also double checked to make sure all my connections are correct this time so we're going to plug this back in we'll change back to the cameras try this again hopefully no other components got damaged by that but I think it was probably just the esp32 okay we're going to try this again I will admit being a little bit more nervous the second time than I was the first time plug this back in again and hopefully hey our light came on that's a good sign but we still don't have any LEDs lighting up ooh luckily it was just the GPI open setting in in wled uh it was defaulting to the wrong gpio pen so I just had to go in and tell it the right GPO pin so that's the good news we've got our our 30 LEDs lighting up in Orange which is right now I'm going to go into wled and I'll show this later I'm going to go ahead and tell it I've got 100 LEDs I'm going to set up the microphone and the IR and the button gpio pins so we can come back and test all that all right I've went and I've configured all the gpio pins in wled now I've got all 100 lit up here so one of the first things I want to do here is I'm going to go over and just select a sound reactive and you can see already that it's reacting to my speech so the microphone is working so all the different sound reactive effects we'll come back and look at these later when we get them hung up but that does let me know that the microphone is working so I'm gonna go back to solid and we will test and our button is working so that's good now we will try remote and I can see my remote is flashing up here but it's receiving on this and and I know I can fix that later so a quick follow-up on the IR remote I did go ahead and decide to flash standard wled the non-sound reactive version to a second ESP and I swap that out into there and if we take a look at this again our button works but in this particular case the IR remote also works so come to find out that sound reactive wled has IR functionality disabled by default apparently it causes some issue with the sound reactivity so you can enable it but it does require that you modify a header file and compile your own but for the purpose of this I'm going to stick with standard sound reactive it's just note that when you are using sound reactive wled currently you cannot use an IR remote so I give a quick update here on the soldered version as I work on it I'm not going to go through step by step on this because it's really just a standard w LED controller with some optional components and I Do cover that in other videos I did opt to go ahead and use the sn74 shifter here really just because I had some extras laying around for my other project but you just easily use the I Square C shifter and the blog article shows wiring diagrams for both types of shifters and of course this is socketed and the nice thing about that it does allow me to do some wiring underneath it also allows me to swap back and forth between the standard wled and the sound reactive wled for testing of the curtain so here are my thoughts on the controller box I've just got a plastic storage container here with a lid that clamps on enough room for my power supply and my controller board I think I'm going to mount the controller board on these little offsets the bottom of this is concave enough that I don't think the end of these will protrude and stop this from sitting flat plenty of room to make my power Connections in here fly I've gone ahead and added offsets I've gone ahead and used a Dremel and a box knife to cut a hole for my AC power supply a drill for my hole for my push button right now I have this small little hole for the microphone again I'm not 100 sure on the placement of that I'm gonna have to do a little bit of testing so this is with the electro cookie board mounted and my power supply and my push button is mounted again I still haven't mounted the microphone because I'm not 100 sure on that but I'm far enough along I think I want to go ahead and hook up some temporary power connections and do one final binge test of this controller before I move on to connecting it to the full install they have made temporary power connections here just to give this soldered board a quick bench test currently I have standard wled there we go that is a good sign so let's go ahead and bring up wled here just do a quick check of our colors make sure that those are correct just do a quick everything looks good there let's go back to solid test our push button that works and we will test our remote and that is working so everything is good with the standard controller I'm now going to swap out the standard controller for the sound reactive version okay I've swapped out the controller this is the sound reactive version let's go ahead and fire that up once again we'll check a couple of colors and of course we do need to check the microphone one two three okay so the microphone is working we'll double check the button it turns them off turns them back on so all is good now of course the IR remote does not work with the sound reactive version but otherwise I can either use the sound reactive version or the standard version everything is good with the controller with the final controller built and tested it's now time to move on to trying to string those LEDs and hanging our curtain on the wall so this is how I'm going to attempt to do this or try it here on the floor and hopefully this will work but this is going to be pixel one so this is where it's going to connect to the controller and then it's just going to be Serpentine back and forth I'm actually going to use a little bit of masking tape just here at the start to hold everything in place once I get everything adjusted I'll probably add a little bit of hot glue so we're going to start here with pixel one I'm just going to stick that okay we're at the end of the first strip here and so far so good now what I'm going to do is just use the jst connectors here to connect my second strip now unlike normal ws2812b pixel strips there is no copper pads to be able to cut this these are very thin wires it might be possible to cut these in solder them but I'm going to use the jst connectors because we're just going to be able to hide those inside of the pipe and you won't see them but before I actually do that I'm going to go ahead and connect these up and I want to do a sanity check just to make sure that we don't have any issues with wiring or even a faulty LED strip okay while my controller box isn't done yet it's far enough along I can make some temporary connections so I've gone ahead and I've connected that up I've went in wled and I've told it that I now have 200 LEDs instead of 100 so let's go ahead and turn that on all right well you can see that all of them are lighting up but the ones at the end are are flickering and acting funny but you can also see after right about 100 LEDs the color is starting to fade maybe you can't see it from the orange towards the red so that's most likely a power injection issue we are going to do power injections at the end of this second strip so hopefully that will take care of the problem but everything up to this point is at least working okay I've completed the second strand which is a total of 200 pixels but at this point I'm actually going to do power injection so I'm running a separate five volt line down here to inject power but I want to go ahead and test the strip that was showing as faulty before now that we actually have the power injection you need to up my wled count to 300 pixels now to count for that third Strand and if we turn that on well they appear to be fine okay all four strands a total of 400 pixels have been strung up there I've went ahead and updated wled to say I've got 400 pixels and we turn it on and everything looks good I couldn't help myself I went ahead and defined the Matrix layout but I at least I wanted to see at least a few Matrix effects to see how it was going to look and it's actually looking quite well so now the next test will be to try to raise this up and adjust everything so the strands are all straight and aligned and I do want to mention it appears that that strand that was acting bad before does appear to be working fine although I did put it at the very end that way in case I get to the point where I do need to replace it and it does start to act up it will be easier to do than if it was somewhere in the middle but let's take a quick look at the power injection while we can still see the back side of these pipes before it gets hung up on the wall so for power injection I'm just running a separate set of leads from the power supply I'm using a barrel connector here you see I'm running that down through my pipe and then right there I'm actually using Wago clips to connect to the power injection and again I go ahead and continue that wire down and do power injection at the end now an interesting thing about these fairy lights is they only have power injection wires at the beginning of the strip and not at the end as well like ws2812b so I just used another jst connector cut off the data line and use that for my power injection power injection is necessary because of the voltage drop and we saw what can happen when the voltage drops too low so I went ahead and decided to remove the masking tape that was holding the LEDs in place I just felt like soon as I tried to pick this up that masking tape wasn't going to hold the LEDs and they were going to pop out of those slots so I added really just a touch of hot glue over the top of each slot just enough to hold the LEDs in place and the idea is when I'm ready to store this I would simply roll it up to the two halves put them together maybe bind them together with a rubber band or a zip tie and then I could store them and take it back out whenever needed now why am I talking about the storage now before I ever even get the project done well that's because Mrs resinchem saw me running these here on the floor and she actually made the recommendation to install them right here and she said why would you even want to take them down I think I've already got a pretty good wife approval Factor on this particular project and I may not be taking this down and storing it when I'm done we may actually leave it right here on the wall but for now I need to go get her and have her help me hang them up now what I didn't show earlier is I actually mounted a couple of eye bolts into that top piece this whole thing is very lightweight so I used about a two and a half inch nail directly into the drywall with no anchors to be able to hang this up and it is holding it securely so not a lot of concern now I actually had someone in one of my comments tell me I needed to smile more well get ready for it I was pretty happy that this worked out this is the final design I came up with for my enclosure or my controller box I've been able to do all of my wiring again I won't cover all that it is covered in the wiring diagrams in the blog article now instead of trying to determine the length of these wires and having them dangling out what I decided to do instead was keep these very short and then just build myself some extension cables or pigtails so there's one for the start of the LEDs I've got another one for my power injection line and again I just used some braided sleeve and shrink wrap to try to make these look a little bit neater now the nice thing is when it comes time to store this I can simply unplug the AC cord from the outside I can pull these back I can take my extension cables and take my remote control I can take my extra controller put those all in there put the lid on and now I've got an easy way to store this until the next time I want to use the LED curtain so with everything built it's time to take a look at the final project now just be aware it's very difficult to film LEDs with the camera and so what you're going to see here on the screen does not do it just as to how well it really looks this is also the part to be aware that there'll be a lot of strobing and flashing lights if you happen to be sensitive to that so let's start out by taking a look at some of the features and effects of standard wled we're going to start out with a fun little animation here we're only going to take a look at a few here that are currently over 40 different specific Matrix animations and I'm sure that more are going to be added all the time so this is just a handful and note that each of these animations have additional adjustments to them not just brightness but things like speed and intensity so there are a lot of different settings for each of these that you can fine tune those in I kind of like that one it almost looks 3D it's very hard to film pixels or LEDs so this looks much much better in person than it does here on the camera but it'll give you an idea of just a handful of effects I'll show more of these effects towards the end when we're actually going to do a comparison to see how we did versus the retail version but there are a few other features that I do want to point out here and one of those is the ability to do scrolling text change the color on that there's another unique option here and that is the ability to actually upload images to wled and we'll take a look at that next now one of the things that the Govi and I believe a couple of other versions have is the ability what they call DIY mode where you can draw with your finger or possibly even upload an image to the curtain unbeknownst to me this was also available in wled it just involves downloading a simple HTML file you come into here and you give it the IP address of your wlad controller you tell it the scale in my case is 20 pixels by 20 pixels and now I can simply click and upload any kind of pixel art so we'll just choose an Angry Bird here at first and you see it actually gives me this and it looks like this on The Matrix now it's not high resolution we're only talking 400 pixel resolution here but you can definitely tell what it is also note that not only does it do that it'll actually create the home assistant yaml for you if you want to use this in an automation let's just try another one here let's try this alligator and we'll just come down here and tell it to send a device and there you can see it kind of looks like the alligator or what's even more fun is I'm actually going to take this which is actually a photo and I'm going to go ahead and tell it to send to the device and that's what it looks like no it's not photorealistic but if you have the ability to create your own images in a pixel art format you can simply upload them directly to your Matrix here it's kind of a nice feature I didn't know was even available in wled okay now let's take a look at the sound reactive version the only thing I've done here is I've swapped out the esp32 with standard wled or the esp32 with sound reactive wled and before you make any comments I apologize about the music I'm using here I would love to be able to show you what it looks like with something like AC DC or some music that you might recognize but copyright prevents me from doing so and just to give you an idea of how good the microphone is here I am standing approximately 15 feet away from the microphone I'm using a mic this for the cell phone here but my voice is not being Amplified whatsoever I'm going to actually walk all the way around my basement here and continue to talk again my voice is not being Amplified this is just how well that microphone is actually picking up the sound so I'm probably a good 30 feet away at this point and I'm going to walk back over closer and you'll see how it as I get closer it picks up more of my voice and kind of expands all the different lights so the microphone is working really well let's take a look at a demo now with some music foreign [Music] so let's take a quick look at the feature comparison between the Govi version and the DIY version now I don't own the Govi lights so the information I provide here is based on other reviews and the official Govi website when we take a look at the outdoor rating both the Govi LEDs and the LEDs I used here ip65 rated now the controller for gobi's only ip44 rated which means it's protected against a little bit of splashing which is probably the same thing you get out of that plastic box that I used for my controller as far as Alexa and Google Govi does support that wlad currently has some Alexa integration to be able to use Google you would have to use something like home assistant or some other intermediate party local control most of that is available through the Govi app using Bluetooth on your phone for wlad all control is local as far as the app type again for the Govi you have to use your phone to be able to control the LEDs for wlad you can use an app on your phone you can use a browser and of course you can use home assistant speaking of Home assistant currently the Govi integration into home assistant does require use of the cloud by wled is completely local with Native integration into home assistant animation I really don't know how many Govi has I'm going to say it probably has dozens of different animations but wlad has well north of 100 different animations 40 plus animations specifically made for a matrix like this as far as scenes and presets yes they both have that wled has the ability to create presets and playlists and you can set themes based on colors and other options both have sound reactivity both have an integrated mic the Gobi version has that apparently you can finger paint onto your phone screen and upload that as an image wled currently doesn't have that but it does have the ability to upload an image which we saw a little bit ago now that's supposedly pending with the Gobi version but I don't know if it's currently there as of the time of this recording the Govi version has a local button but is on off only wlad has a multi-function button wlad has the ability to use an IR remote with the non-sound reactive version Govi does not have an IR remote now Govi does have more LEDs their current curtain has 520 what I built only has 400 you can easily add more LEDs to my version you just need a little bit bigger power supply and probably a longer pipe but the esp32 could easily support 800 to 1000 LEDs and finally the cost the Govi version is currently going for about 130 on Amazon it's hard for me to say exactly what you would spend to build the wled version it kind of depends on what you might already have at home but you're not going to save a lot of money I spent about 70 dollars for the LEDs about another 20 for the power supply 15 for the pipe I probably have around 130 dollars into mine and you're probably going to have somewhere between 100 and 150. so this particular project wasn't about saving money but it was really about being able to build a local completely within your control version with what I think are more features than you get out of the retail version Plus for me personally I got the enjoyment and satisfaction out of building my own instead of just buying a retail version so that's going to do it for what is once again a rather lengthy video and I wasn't even able to cover everything so if you are interested in building one of these be sure to check out the related written version of this which you can find a link to down in the video description it will contain all the information that I just wasn't able to cover in this video you also find additional information down in the video description including links for more information if you found it in this video useful do me a favor and hit that thumbs up button click that subscribe button if you'd like to see more of my content and ding that little bell icon if you want to be notified when I release new videos as always I would like to say thank you for watching and I hope to see you soon quit

Channel: ResinChem Tech

Views: 116,348

Keywords: LED Curtain, Sound reactive, WLED, Dancing LEDs

Id: 9DqVpScO-xQ

Length: 32min 34sec (1954 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 22 2023