I’m Never Buying LEDs Again! EASY DIY WLED!

[Music] all right so if you've known me for some time I have been interested in LED technology like this right here because I just think it's really fascinating and a really awesome way to light up your space and for the longest time I've always recommended lifx LED strips to you guys to purchase because I just think they're the best with the effects that you can do with them and I think effects are what really set these things apart so in front of me right here is a Philips hue LED strip now these things are really expensive and to be honest I've got no idea why other than the fact that they are super reliable I'd install something like this for my clients for example like the beta squad for example I want to install it leave it and I want it to basically just work the problem is with these though yeah they're great you can light them up with a color and turn them off and on Via a mobile app but it literally ends there no effects or anything now behind this screen right here I've got a lifx trip you can see me turning that on there and I can also go ahead and adjust the brightness the things I like about the lifx strips though is that you can go onto themes here and choose one of these themes and what this will do is go ahead and on different portions of the actual strip themselves you can assign a different color and then you can actually go ahead and animate these so they change and I'm just clicking on the different themes here but just to show you guys that we've got green down here red here purple up here you can have a different color along the entire strip now as good as the lifx strips are they do come with some downsides the first thing is the price back to the Philips Hue strip for a second to get set up with that ecosystem you not only need the strip itself but you need the Philips Hue bridge to interface with your internet connection the difference with these lifx ones is they work over Wi-Fi this is the controller for the lifx strip and as you can see it's power in one side and then a cable out to the LED strip the other problems with these ready-made systems is that they are all built in so let's say we want to extend the cable between the box here the controller box in our LED strip well we can't do that because it's pre-made and I have tried and attempted to do that but it's not powerful enough this thing is not powerful enough to go longer than this cable run now in this video I'm going to show you how to turn one of these little ESP development boards these things are a Fiverr off Amazon into your own custom LED controller which come with loads of benefits you can run an extremely long cable between here and the start of your LED strip you can choose the power supply depending on how many LEDs you want to drive and the icing on the cake you can run some insane effects of this effects unlike what you can find even on the lifx strip and I think this is going to blow you guys away as to how simple this is so without further Ado let's get straight into this now this thing does look super super intimidating but I'm going to walk you through step by step on how to do this and honestly it's really easy these have Wi-Fi built in and a microwave a USB port so to get this thing set up we're going to micro USB this into the side of our computer so once you've got your development board hooked into your computer I'm on a Mac here it also works on Windows go to Google and type in install wled and then click on the first one here and it's going to take you to install.wled dot me now here we have an option to tick if our board has Ethernet or not now you can get these ESP boards with built-in ethernet this one has Wi-Fi which we're going to be utilizing choose the latest version of wled go ahead and click on install and then you want to choose the development board which is here the one that we've just plugged into our computer go ahead and click connect and then it's going to go ahead and connect and basically click install wled install and that is it installation complete that literally took all of two minutes click next and now it's going to ask for our Wi-Fi password so go ahead and enter in your Wi-Fi you want your board to connect to so it's taken about three minutes to install the wled software on our development board and tell it our Wi-Fi password once it's connected it's going to say on your screen visit device now this device has connected to your Wi-Fi and giving itself an IP address and as you can see I'm connected to right now 192.168.55.88 your number will be different here so don't worry about that but this is the main console for wled how easy was that now if I go ahead and click the power button here you can see on this board if I turn off the power it turns off the LED we turn back on the power it turns on the LED so if we can control One LED on this board how about 300 now another great plus side to this is you can choose what LED strip you would like to use so if you come in close and look at these for a quick second you can see that we've got the lifx strip here and you can see the distance between each LED then we've got a super cheap LED strip and then we've got the ones that I've purchased for this project which have the LEDs super close together now why would you want them close together mainly because the effects will look better the closer the LEDs are together so I'm going to have all this stuff Linked In the description these things may look daunting but it's really not because most people that do this will actually solder straight to this development board but what we're going to do is use some of these as a little hack and you can basically just tear these off here and then you've got a little cable here which can go onto the pins of your development board so what I'm going to do is with the LED strips that I've bought here they come with this little connector on the end so I'm basically going to say bye bye to that and then I'm going to Bear all of these wires and to these wires I'm going to connect in these which are our little jumper cables and just for now until we get things up and running I'm just going to twist them together just so we can prove that it's working so this is where you have to follow along really carefully we're going to want to take our positive and that is going to want to go on the VIN terminal on our ESP board then we're going to want to take our negative or ground and this is going to go on the ground pin so for me that is right next to the VIN Port there and then this is our data cable so this is what tells which LEDs to change to what color which ones to light up and which ones not to this is going to go on the D4 pin so one two three four there's our D4 straight on there and as you can see our LEDs have lit up but not all of them as you can see they stop there why is this so in this one meter strip that I have bought we can see here via the Amazon listing that we have 144 LEDs on this one strip so let's go back to our wled software we're going to go ahead and click on config here LED preferences and then here where it says length we're going to change this from 30 to 144 and then we're going to go ahead and click save and now you can see that all of our LEDs have lit up so if I click back here and change around on this color wheel you can see whatever color I set this 2 it changes color great so we've got our sort of Philips Hue ripoff right here what I'm going to go ahead and do now though is click on the effects tab just to show you guys a few of these effects one of my favorite ones is fireworks 1D so I'm going to use the search click on fireworks 1D here and as you can see it sends out some fireworks and then the fireworks explode yeah you guys get the point you can't do stuff like this with Philips Hue you can almost get there with lifx but it's not cool effects like this and as you can see via this list there are hundreds of different effects that are pre-installed and you can even code if you would like to your own custom effects and do things like light shows with this okay so now all of this is set up what I can go ahead and do is use some heat shrink tubing to make sure all of these aren't exposed to the elements but before I go ahead and do that I'm going to actually extend these wires so we have a few meters of cable to play with between our controller and the start of our LED strip and to do that I'm going to use some bog standard Cat5e ethernet cable foreign [Music] as you can see we have our LED strip here running our fireworks 1D effect it is connected to our ESP board with our cable here cat 5e and as you can see it's all working now the next step is to basically put these things into these diffuser tubes so you'll be able to see here as I apply this piece of diffuser over the LED strip which is inside the tube you can see how that changes how this looks okay so we have our first LED strip installed running the effects now Jed has helped me do three more of these so with these connectors what we can go ahead and do is basically just connect to them together now the beauty of this is let's say you wanted some space between each one of your strips like we did between the first LED strip and the SP board you can just snip these cables and extend them to be pretty much as long as you would like okay so with a little bit of fiddling out the way we've got all our LED strips set together now if I have to go into the config here and click on LED preferences we've got 576 piped into our length which is how many individual LEDs we have in our massive strips here so hopefully this is going to work if I go back click back again and turn them on oh wow look at the look at the effects all of these LEDs right here are being powered off the USB and that's why they're quite dim so in this box we have a standard 5 volt 10 amp power supply which terminates in a barrel plug now what I'm going to go ahead and do is Snip the end off this and bear these wires so basically with this 5 volt 10 amp power supply I've spliced it into the positive and negative terminals that go to the LED strips and to our ESP board the data line has just been left as it was before now the beauty of this is it gives us more power for the LEDs and also Powers our ESP board without it being connected to the computer so this is all set up so obviously you can control these things via the web interface but an app is much better so wled have made one if you click on the plus button in the top corner and click on Discover lights it will go ahead and find all of the extra ESP boards on your network so as you can see here I've got my kitchen ceiling which is my pre-installed ones and our new wleds if I click the on button you can see that these turn on now let's go into here because we need to change some more settings now that we've added our power supply go to config go to LED preferences and then what we want to go ahead and do is change the milliamp hours that we have currently available so through the USB port we have about a maximum of 850 but with a 10 amp power supply that's 10 000 milliamps that we have available now I'm not going to pipe 10 000 in here just because I don't want to hit this power supplies limit so I'm going to put in here 8 000 and then I'm going to go ahead and click save and as soon as I do that you can see that these led strips get considerably brighter and we have a load more power to play with and you ain't getting anything like that from the likes of Philips Hue you and lifx and the kicker in all of this is this is better and less than half the price and and we've had fun doing it the process has been good because it's rewarding when you spend time doing something like this and then you get an end result now it's over to you guys to send us some pictures of what you do with your wled installs but for now man has been Alex this has been awesome and I'll see you in the next one peace [Music] all right [Music]

Channel: TechFlow

Views: 711,443

Keywords: techflow, techflow review, New tech, new technology, alex brooks, marzbar, wled, how to make leds, how to install leds, easy wled install, easy wled effects, wled light show, leds esp32, wireless led, diy led strip

Id: QpnPRPdflq8

Length: 13min 11sec (791 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 06 2022