Doing your 1st LED Project, Step by Step, Start to Finish, w/ DrZzs & Zzachy ws2812 + DigUno + WLED

how's it going i still get a lot of questions about what do i need to do a basic led project so zachary here asked if we could put some leds up in this toy room slash whatever xbox room and i said sure and i figured this is a good opportunity to film the whole process and show everybody who's doing this for the first time exactly what you need and exactly what i do when i'm doing a new led project so here we go [Music] first thing you got to do is make a plan in fact probably 90 of what you need to do is make the plan first part of the plan is decide where you want the leds so zach where do we want these leds right up here okay he wants a line of leds a strip of colored leds along the sort of crease in the roof here great so we got out a tape measure and measured and it's just about 16 feet which is really nice because one strip of leds is about 16 feet so we'll be able to use one strip so first things we have to consider is the length okay that's numero uno then you got to think about the led density and when i think density i don't think this [Music] the density refers to how far apart the leds are exactly how far apart the leds are basically your options when it comes to strips and density is 30 leds per meter 60 leds per meter or 144 leds per meter okay we're going to use 30 leds per meter things to think about when you're choosing density one is the more leds you have the more power you're going to need the more expensive it is and the brighter it is once we know the length and the density then the next thing we can do is figure out the power consumption so how much power is it going to need these are the strips we're going to use these are ws 2812 which is like the most generic most common easiest to get cheapest but still really good they still work great and they do what they need to do these are 30 leds per meter and this is 5 meters which is about 16 feet which means it's 150 leds total so the reason that you need to know the length and the density is because to find out how much power you need you got to know how many leds you have okay when you're figuring out the power there's a few ways to do it there's there's the right way and then there's my way i wish i was kidding i'll tell you the right way to do it or the not the right way but the uh the most conservative way to do it so the conservative measurement to figure out how much power you need is to say 0.6 amps per led okay so 150 leds if you multiply 150 by .06 pause for math if you have 150 of these leds at 5 volts that's 9 amps if you had these leds on full brightness and all white meaning all three of the tiny little leds that are on here are all on as bright as they can you probably still wouldn't get to nine amps so that's one extreme .06 amps per led is is one extreme the other extreme the other extreme the the level that i feel safe with that i wouldn't feel safe below is .02 amps per led at .02 amps per led this will require three amps a three amp power supply so if we had a three amp power supply i would be fine to power this with three amps i would feel okay with that not everybody else would but there's also a limiter in wled so i'll show you that and by setting that limit to three amps you're not gonna cause any problems anyways because the software will keep you from making these too bright and causing your power supply to melt it won't allow it it won't allow it exactly because it's what i have handy we got this thing we got this this is a 10 amp power supply so this is 5 volts 10 amps 10 amps 10 amps you're looking at me like i'm crazy okay so i get this question a lot if i have a 10 amp power supply and these are going to use 9 amps am i going to fry my leds if i push 10 amps in well you're not going to push 10 amps in exactly that's not how it works right yeah these draw the current if you had these and say that they you go at nine uh amps right you got them full bright white everything and you have like a three amp power supply if you go touch that power supply it's going to be super hot okay and it may start to break down and eventually fail that's because you you tried to draw more power from the power supply than it was able to provide and you fried it and you fried it so this is what dies if you don't match these up right having a 10 amp power supply having a 20 amp power supply isn't gonna matter to the leds yeah unless it's lower than what they can draw so that's that so we've got the leds we've got the length we've got the density picked out we've got the power supply next thing we need is the controller the controller we're going to use is one of these this is a digi uno which is a wi-fi chip and a bunch of other stuff that makes it work better than if you were just using the wi-fi chip alone like a logic level shifter to boost the data signal fuse some capacitors it also gives you the option to switch voltages if you wanted to use 12 volt leds instead of 5 volt leds i think it's one of the best controllers you can get for any led project and wled is definitely the best led controlling software anywhere in the universe when you first connect one of these controllers it will broadcast a wi-fi that is named wled ap so this is the wled access point you connect to it and it will ask you for a password the password is lowercase wld1234 once you've successfully connected to that wi-fi network you open up a browser and you go to 4.3.2.1 and this will bring up this splash page normally the first thing that i do is go to wi-fi settings and put in the name and password for our wi-fi here at the house but for this kind of walk-through example we're going to use this other option which is just to go into the controls and start setting up the controller a little bit first and then we'll do the wi-fi settings last so to the controls often people will come to me and say hey i got this controller and i plugged it into the leds and only like the first bunch of leds are working like something's broken that's because by default the led count is only set to 30. so if you have 100 leds only 30 of them are going to light up so the first thing you got to do to make sure that all your leds are working is to go in here and change this led count to whatever number of leds you actually have what if you go more you can go more if you want it won't hurt anything it just the effects might not be quite right best thing to do count the number of leds you actually have once you've got it installed and put that number in here we know that we have 150 leds on that strip so we're going to put in 150 here now look what it tells you here it gives you the recommended power supply this is calculated based on this down here you can change this if you're using different leds if you wanted to be less conservative you can change that to this and it will change the recommended power supply and then if you have 12 volt leds because volts are very important when you're figuring out amps kind of critical actually then you can put 12 volt and then it would figure 30 milliamps per led it does say this for most effects something about three amps is enough right it's almost like i knew what i'm talking about now down here enable automatic brightness limiter this is what i was telling you about when i said that the controller itself the software can limit how much power the leds will draw let's say i only bought a 3 amp power supply if i wanted to make sure that regardless of how many leds or how bright i set them if i wanted to make sure that they never drew more than three amps then i would put 3000 in here because this is milliamps this will use the software to limit the brightness of the led strip so that it never goes above 3 amps so if i put this at 3 i could safely use a 3 amp power supply regardless of how big your power supply is this number here should never be bigger than your power supply but we have a 10 amp power supply so we can go ahead here and we can put 9 amps here nine amps through a small wire is gonna get really hot and may melt and cause a problem if we put this at something like 5000 so maximum of five amps that'll be fairly safe for pretty much any wire that we're going to use at least if the leds show up as the wrong color you just come in here and change this the ws2811s have a different rgb color order than the 2812s apply a preset at boot by default the way wled is uh out of the box they just turn on yellow we could also just turn this off like if you don't want the leds to come on automatically after you reset or after the power gets turned off and turned back on if you don't want them to come on automatically then you just uncheck that box this is the night light timer uh there's a little moon on the front page if you click that moon it basically turns on a timer and the leds will slowly fade to off in that period of time that's so cool you like that yeah i like that a lot oh well good uh and then if you were using a sacrificial pixel then you can activate this box here and skip that first pixel we're not doing that all right and anytime you make any changes you got to hit save so we did led preferences let's go to user interface uh let's give it a name server description so this is what it will show up as on the app so we're going to call it wled toy room okay we're not going to change anything else here for now all right so we've saved that user interface now we go sync interfaces this however is very important if you want amazon echo to respond and be able to change colors and such on this then you have to activate this and give it a pretty unique name so we're going to call this the toy room fancy lights so you'll have to say aleka turn off the toy room fancy lights or you can say aleka set the toy room fancy lights to blue that's all you got to do on this sync page for right now save that you do have to go to aleka and tell her to discover new devices before she'll discover okay so we did sync interfaces time and macros this is important you want it to know what time it is right now it thinks it's january 1st 1970 at 2am click this box set it to our time zone you can do a countdown timer like you could set it so that on a certain day it would do something but you would have to change this to the specific day including the year so it would only do this once all right then down here where it says countdown over preset you could set it to whatever preset you want to turn on at that moment so that's the closest thing that we have right now in wled to like a calendar timer it'll change but that's what it is right now these are also uh pretty important for turning the things on and off at a certain time of day they don't do dates so it doesn't do like december 25th but it does do the time and the day of the week so say you want them to make sure to be turned off at a certain time every night you could say something like at 11 o'clock you know run preset number let's just say it's number nine and we will have to go in and set number nine to be turn off the lights and then every day of the week at 11 o'clock it'll turn off that light if it's on if you don't want that you don't have to delete this you just deactivate it and that's it now we're here to uh the last box we're doing the latest version so that's it that's it that's all the settings the last thing then that we'll do is we'll go into the wi-fi setup and we'll put in our network stuff we're going to give this a specific name and this is the name that actually like home assistant will use when it discovers it so we're going to call this the toy room and then if it ever falls off the network it will again broadcast its access point so it's a good idea to change this name to something that you'll recognize so that you know which device fell off the network so we're going to call it toy reboot and then i like to disable wi-fi sleep so that's it save and connect because we put in our wi-fi it's not going to broadcast its access point it's going to connect to our house so you'll no longer be able to find it at 4.3.2.1 this is what happens so now you've got to find it the best way to find it for most people is going to be to go to the app and just search for new devices and it'll show up so we're going to go to our router we're going to search through all of the wi-fi clients that we have we're going to look for anything that is named wled and here you go wled toy room but right now this is the ip address so now when we want to connect to this device and make changes if we're not in the app on the phone we have to go to this ip address so instead of 4.3.2.1 now it's 192.168.1.133 so now we go up here we go to 192.168.1.3 [Music] oh that's what the problem is we put in presets don't exist okay don't do that create a preset all right so we're going to go here we're going to do fireworks 1d and now we can go in here and we can say overwrite state so what this will do now is save whatever we've got here for the effects we can see what what they would look like boom that's cool right that's the fireworks one all right last thing i want to show you you got to find a a really cool something out there on the internet like so we're going to right click this copy image address we're going to go here we're gonna go to user interface and then down here and paste that in save it back back there it is how about it cut his head off so this thing is all set now we've gone into the config we've most importantly set the number of leds and the current limit and the type and the rgb color order once we have that stuff done now we can take this controller connect it to the leds and see if it works and you always always always want to make sure that it works before you actually install anything okay okay let's go do that this is our controller this is what we just did all those wled settings on okay a couple important things about it this part just pops off okay so that's the controller part this is the digital without the controller on top these two pins over here are where you put in the power this is the jumper that everybody gets wrong and blows up their stuff so we're using 5 volts so we're going to set that on 5 volts and then these over here are for the outputs the ones we're going to use are this one this one and that one these connections here have some writing on the board there too so you can see what's what all right so let's wire it all up so these two wires are going to be the main power wires they go from the power supply to the controller leds have an arrow to indicate where the data starts and where it goes so the data arrows go from here this way so you connect your controller on this end okay so this end this is the the far end right and they give you this so that you could connect another strip but we're not going to connect another strip no so we don't need this yeah okay so we're going to just cut this off bye so you can just cut this strip as well so we could just cut the strip like this this guy however is going to be great for making this connection so we're going to take this and extend it out with a bunch of wire okay we don't know how far that's gonna need to go though so just to test our lights we're gonna hook it up to this sometimes these uh thin little bits of wire don't connect too well to the connectors here so you can either throw some solder on there or you can crimp on another little um you know they make these little tips little ends that are metal you can put on there but that's typically what i do is i just you twist it and then bend it yeah i bend it over so that it's a little bit thicker and it has a little bit of something to grab into so we put the input power over here and then this is where you put the output so you put the output power there and then this is the ground so that one goes in there okay and then with these kind of lights you connect this to the data line which is this one so this one was data the one next to it is clock and in this particular case with this kind of leds we don't need clock for anything so that's l1d instead of l1c yes double check everything ground here 5 volts there data there ground here voltage in there our jumper is set to 5 volts that jumper is in the right place okay this is done you can now put this guy on here once you've got this attached to this board the way to power this is just by connecting power here you don't want to connect it here so it will always go with the antenna facing out and the usb facing in let's take the power supply and plug it in and now if everything is good when i plug this in the blue light will come on here i think there's a light on this as well and then those should all light up it works we got lights we have lights yay lights huzzah magic powers we don't want this controller to be right here next to these leds no so what we're going to do is disconnect this now that we know that it works and we're going to extend that wire exactly we're going to make that's what this is for so this is three conductor wire we're gonna use this to extend the distance between between the controller and the leds if all you had was just the d1 mini here and not the logic level shifter that's on this digi uno then if you made this distance between the controller and the first led any longer it would probably not be a very good signal it would start flickering and be ugly okay is that and that's when a a null pixel no pixel that's what they're called yes or sacrificial pixel but sacrificial is a lot more syllables so i like null pixel now that we know that the leds are working and the controller is working we can actually go ahead and install them so the next thing to consider when you're doing a project like this is how you want to mount the lights uh-huh um and something that's important to think about is when you look right at these lights when they're turned on it's really harsh if there is such a thing as a sharp light that's what this looks like it's it like kind of pokes your eyes yeah so with these kinds of lights you need some kind of a diffuser what we're going to use is this aluminum channel with yep with this plasticky not very see-through diffuser yeah channel okay so we're gonna use that another thing that you could do is like what we did in the girls room where we have that crown molding stuff facing up because if you if you just point these like away from your eyes and they reflect off of something else like a wall or something that looks really good too i do like this though you do okay i think so good well i'm glad you like it because that's what we're going to use again okay so let's get this installed just right up there you know we need a ladder or ladders yeah because i'm too short for this [Music] [Music] [Music] all right so what we're going to do is is we're going to go like that and then we're gonna go down uh and then over there so that's enough so we're gonna cut this wire here and then we're gonna connect it to there so that we have like a bit of an extension cord this side will go up there again and the other side will go into the dig uno okay here we go alrighty lee how are we gonna how do you want to connect these should we whichever one is least likely to catch on fire well but you want it to also not be too ugly yeah so whichever one is most pretty i don't care about fire i don't remember where my heat gun went oh yes i do it's in the basement my heat gun i wonder if you could just use a hair dryer as a heat gun are you filming yes you stinker these are those fairy lights those these are ws2812s but they're tiny little things and they have just this sort of wispy little wire that connects them together but they're full rgb lights i mean this is running wled you can do all the effects and everything just looks really cool i think wrapped around the banister like that i like it mucho very nice mom's not gonna like that the house is a mess and it's on a video hi honey all right these are what i've been calling the soldery melty connectors i don't know what else to call them well i could probably look it up but that's what i like to call them we got a little bit of solder in the middle heat shrink tubing and some kind of fancy glue stuff here so slide that on twist this together this is your tutorial zack this is for you buddy okay not for the rest of the world this is for you twist that together like that and then you slide it back in here until that solder point is over the joint that you made stop focusing on the wrong thing there you go so it melts those red spots and it's got this uh water seal stuff on the outside and then it melted the solder in the middle to solder those connections together so that's like the best kind of connection you can make and it's pretty easy this is just the other end of this now so we made this really long and now this part i'm just stripping off the ends so we can screw it into the ditch with the wrong kind of wire strippers because i lost a couple pairs of wire strippers this week but when you're a beginner you might not have all the right equipment and that's okay you can you can strip wires with your teeth when in dire need and on a rooftop and you just can't get down you gotta just deal with your teeth okay let's go did you know did you know don't estas back to this make sure we put these things in the right place white is ground so that goes here okay this is the data and it goes into the data ld l2 ld1 i think it's called designer l1d yeah that's it l1d and then this is the five volts it goes to the lights okay all righty nz's we can start making our connections again plug in our power supply plug in our lights up here all right we're gonna hide that wire better again in a minute let us demonstrate [Laughter] and show it again [Laughter] what else can i be when i live in a world of fools such as this you gonna spit it out thank you tastes like licorice oh really no oh who's gonna vacuum eventually me oh good so we have our wires connected up there our three wires going to the leds those three wires are going in the output side of the digi uno we've got our power supply on the input side about to plug it in we should see a whole bunch of yellow lights up there it wasn't working so i unplugged it and plugged it back in and now what's happening it's beautiful last thing to do is put the diffusers on yep well actually not the last thing to do second to the last thing to do is put these diffusers on the last thing to do is going to be to hide this wire up against this these just snap in here we're done we are done this is your first led project yes it is um i thought it went pretty well do you think if you had to do it on your own now without me that you could do it i think i could do the setting up part but i would have to watch the video again for this for the controller yeah setup software well that was fun yeah i think we included everything that somebody would need just to get started probably i think so okay that's it mission accomplished yeah okay i'll do the next side on my own as always thanks for watching till next time adios [Music] if you need help or want to chat with me or others who also enjoy projects like this you can find us on facebook and discord if you like what i'm doing and you want to support me you can use my special product links in the video description or head over to patreon or just like and share my videos that's easy if you like this video and you want to see more like it this box will take you to a playlist of some of my favorites in addition to videos like this i also do live streams every sunday this box will take you to a recording of the latest live stream that's all for now adios

Channel: DrZzs & GrZzs

Views: 422,711

Keywords: Home Automation, Home Assistant, Sonoff, DIY, Electronics, Tasmota, Arduino, 3d printing, Home Automation, Home Assistant, Sonoff, DIY, Electronics, Tasmota, Arduino, 3d printing, smart home, hassio, esp8266, sonoff basic, iot, nodemcu, drzzs, wemos d1, esphome, home automation, automation, tech, drzzzs, dr zzs, dr zzzs, hassos, home assistant, home assistant automation, iot home automation, tasmota, drzzs sonoff, tech hacks, technical hacks, esp32, iot automation

Id: 3h8bw-vmosY

Length: 28min 34sec (1714 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 13 2020