This video is sponsored by Squarespace. Let's be honest. Why LED Lights for DIY
projects is a complete pain in the ass. From horrible colors
to flickering to some of the most janky apps that I would never even trust
installing on my phone. There are just so many ways
that it can all go wrong. But I am here to tell you
that this $5 board off of AliExpress solves
all of those problems and more. Or at least it's supposed to. I don't actually know
because I just got this thing in the mail. So today we are going to test it out
and see if it lives up to all the hype. So anybody who has ever bought LED Lights knows
that it can be a bit of a crapshoot. In my mind, there are three ways
that LED Lights can go wrong. The first is color, which usually
manifests itself as white light. That is either too yellow, too blue, or it can even be magenta
or kind of green tinted, which makes it really hard to match
new LCD lights to existing lights. Or if you're somebody like me
who films themselves all the time. It can also make your video footage
look downright gross. Next up, they can flicker, which at first
might not seem like that big of a deal because it is imperceptible
to the human eye. However, it can lids eyestrain
and for even some extremely sensitive individuals,
it can lead to migraines. And then for people like me
who like to fool ourselves. Well, then it can lead to lighting that
looks like it's better suited for a race. And then finally, there's software. Many LEDs these days
come with some sort of accompanying smart home app that allows you to control
your LED lights from your smartphone or digital home assistant. You can do things like adjust the brightness, change the colors,
or even create routines for your lights. For example, in my bedroom
I actually have my LED ceiling lights scheduled to
come on 5 minutes before my alarm clock goes off in the morning every morning. And it just kind of helps
to wake me up a little bit. But this software is often buggy, unreliable
and in some cases downright dangerous. You don't always want to give some cheap
LED that you bought off AliExpress for five bucks, access
to your entire home network. And the worst thing is there is no way
to know if a particular LED light is afflicted with any of these issues
until after you've already bought it. I mean, sure, you can look at spec sheets
and you can read online reviews, but manufacturers rarely list the,
um, frequency of their lights
or even the cry of the LEDs. So again, like I said before,
it's all a bit of a crapshoot. Solution up until this point
has just been to buy high end LED lights. My office and most of the rest of my house
is outfitted with these Philips hue lights, but Philips hue lights are the complete
antithesis of the whole DIY mentality. They're both overpriced
and they're closed source, but you know what isn't ridiculously
overpriced and closed source? That's right. The little control board
that I showed earlier, this is an ESP32 and what it is, is an ultra low cost
controller board with integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth support. And what's cool about this
thing is that you can load a custom open source operating system onto
it called WLED. And WLED lets you control a whole wide
range of LED lighting devices. Theoretically, it allows for all that fun,
smart home integration and routines. And I've even heard that it integrates
with Philips Hue Software. So of course I bought one,
but then I also bought this LED strip light five will power supply
and then all the accessories that we're going
to need to make it work together. So let's piece it all together,
see if it does. All right. So the first step here is going to be
installing the WLED software onto the board. So connect it to your computer. Here we go. You can see
the little LED light turned on here. And now you just go to install.wled.me Let me hit install here, select the microcontroller there, connect connecting install WLED, all existing
data will be erased at the turn. Loading, loading, Loading. I do wish this was a usb-c device. It's a little bit annoying to still be using a micro USB connector,
but it is what it is. It's $5 so I can't complain that much. Installation complete. Awesome. Okay, so now the next step is entering
all of your wi fi information so that the ISP 32 can connect
to your Wi-Fi network. Connect. I love that this is all so well guided
for your device connected to the network. That's awesome. Visit device. There we go I’m connected to it already. This is actually really user friendly
for an open source piece of software. Okay, so that's great. We have our software situated and ready to go,
and now we're ready to talk about LEDs. And at this point,
you might be asking yourself, how does this little control board ensure
that get a good accurate colors out of LEDs
and the short answer is that it doesn't. But the long answer is that it
kind of does because it allows you to use whatever LEDs you want. You're no longer tied
to the LEDs that Philips or Govee or whatever third party
manufacturer decides to package with their own controller. And when you're buying bare LEDs,
well then manufacturers are much more forthcoming about stats
like LED diode composition, The CRI of the Light,
and all those other fun geeky stats so you can make sure you are getting whatever LEDs you need
for your particular application. And speaking of specific applications
here, I have a roll of SK6812 RGB W LED lights. And the cool thing about these LEDs
is that each individual
pixel is subdivided into four sub pixels. So you have a blue green red
and then a white sub pixel. So you get really clean
and accurate colors out of these. And when I was buying these lights,
I was actually able to select the color of that white sub pixel
so you can match it to whatever other colors you have in the room. And the really cool thing
about these lights is that they cost about a 10th of what Philips charges
for their LEDs strip lights. So now naturally we just connect the led
to the control board and we're good to go, right? Well, not quite. So this is actually quite
a long roll of LEDs and it's going to pull some serious amps. So if I tried to connect the LEDs directly
to the control board right now, well, I probably end up
frying the small control board. So that's why I got this
five volt power supply. This takes 120 volt AC power from the wall
and converts it down to five volt DC power
and injects it into the LEDs. Theoretically, these LCD shouldn't flicker
because they run on DC power. The flickering you get in
many LED lights is caused by AC power. This is a bit of an oversimplification,
but basically the power in your home is rapidly flicking on and off
about 60 times a second supposedly imperceptible to the human eye. But, you know, like I said before,
headaches and eyestrain. DC Power, on the other hand, is not
supposed to flicker because it's constant. But and this is a rather large
but some DC powered LED lights still do flicker
you confused yet? Yeah. This is why it's such a pain to buy
LCD lights. You see, most LED lights are dimmable
and the multicolored LED lights create different lighting effects by dimming
individual sun pixels independently. Most of the time they do this
through a process called p.w M or pulse with modulation, which is basically just a fancy way
of saying turning on and off the lights really quickly. The faster you do this, the less perceived flicker
there is and the easier it is on our eyes. So how fast is the P.W? I'm on this board. Well, that I don't actually know and
won't know until I get it up and running. So it'll be interesting to see. It might actually even be controllable
in the software first thing we have to do is open up our little power supply
and configure it for North American power. There's a little dip switch in here where you can toggle back
and forth between 110 volts and 220 volts. It's funny because there's
this little sticker on here that's like warranty void
if the seal is broken. But then it also tells you on this sticker
to open it up and flip the switch. Also, I got this off AliExpress. So warranty. Yeah, right. Okay, so there we go. We'll go from 220 to 110. Okay, that's back together now we have to find a way to supply that
with some powerful wolf. So I just bought this little power
adapter off Amazon. I think it was like eight bucks
this and plugs into the wall. This end would normally plug into your computer or whatever,
but I'm going to use these in a chop that off and we're just going
to harvest the wires out of there. Should really do it down
on the cutting board it go be careful to cut the exterior shielding,
but not the exterior plate. Now we'll cut the exterior sheeting, but the interior
sheeting, sheeting, insulation. I'm talking today inside
we have three wires. We have our black wire,
which are live wire. We have a white wire,
which is our neutral. And then we have the green,
which is the ground. Strip these down
so that we get some bare copper on them. But then we get we have our three exposed leaves
with the wire strips. I was then able to connect them
to the power supply. While I handle that, why don't I tell you
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LED lighting We then put side hooked up. Now it was time to connect the output side
of the equation tonight my wire stripper here so we'll
just do this the good old fashioned way. Nope, nope. Cut right through there or no. So this guy right
here is a DuPont crimper, and it basically allows you to make your own easy
to use little electrical connectors. So you take a pen,
you put it in the crimper, feed the wire in, and then crimp it down on it. Now take this crimped pin and we will
put it in a little plastic connector. Slide that in there. Boom. Now we have a nice easy
to use wire on a connector. Well,
I've finished crimping these connectors. Let's talk power supply. It's really,
really important that you properly size your power supply to the LEDs
that you want to drive. The combined draw of my five meter
strip was 90 watts, so that meant that I was going to need
a power supply capable of supplying at least 18 amps
when I actually got here is 20. So theoretically I've got a little bit
of extra headroom with wires crimped all I had to do was screw
the loose ends onto the power supply, connect the wires to the board,
and then I was ready to test. Okay, so theoretically this should
all be wired up and ready to go. Now, I'll give you a brief
kind of overview of how it's all set up, but also includes some links
in the video description that go more in-depth
on how you can wire up your own setup because it's going to change
depending on which board you choose, which LCD lights use
and what power supply needs. But yeah, let me show you how I did it. So my wait wires here are my crowns. They come off of the power supply and go both to the controller
and directly to the LED strip. This green wire here comes off the LCD
strip and goes to the board. That's the data that controls everything. And then we have our positive red wire
here. And again,
we have one wire going to the LED strip and one wire going to the board. Now all that's left is for us to plug this thing in
and see if I did everything right. Maybe I should have made sure I did everything right
before I explained how it worked. Well, we'll see. And hey, it works. Oh, crap. Crap. You definitely don't want to do this. You don't want to have
all of your LEDs coiled up together and then have them turn on
because they could overheat and potentially kill themselves. So let's just uncoil this so that our heat
can dissipate a little bit easier. Let's mess around with the software
and see what we can get this to do. So first things first. Let's see. Can we get these to be white? Well, okay. Yeah, that was pretty easy. Why don't we adjust the brightness here
and see if we can tone them down a little bit? There we go. Not too bad. Let's go even higher. These are actually quite bright. And now you can see in this column here
we have all of these different effects that you can do.
So let's see what Android is. Yeah, okay. I mean, that's maybe kind of interesting. You can have them breathe and. Oh, man, that's horrible. So, you know, as you can see,
there is a whole ton of different lighting effects
that you can do. To be honest, I don't know how often I'm
really going to mess with any of these settings. I think 99% of the time I'm just going
to run them in a solid color mode. But hey, it's good to know that
all those little features are there. So now we have to do some very important
tests. The first one I want to do
is check the white balance on these LEDs. And for those of you who don't know,
you can just put your phone's camera into auto white balance mode and actually read out
what the white balance setting is. So, yeah, we're getting a perfect 5000 kelvin, which is exactly what I asked for
when I bought these lights. And there was also a 3000 Kelvin, a 6000 Kelvin version,
but this is what I wanted for my purposes. Now the next big test is to see
whether or not these flicker. So I've set the brightness of the lights
to 50%, which means that they are being modulated down. I'm going to set my camera to 120 F mode
and I'm going to point it directly at them
and see if we can get anything. This is pretty much a worst case scenario
for lighting. And the best part about
this is if they do flicker, that means that I can basically make
my own studio grade lights. So yeah, let's, let's test. They do flicker.
You know how amazing that is for me. I'm going to be able to make so many cool
DIY lights using these. Now I'm going to do my whole studio
with these lights running off. That's five point board. So awesome. One other thing I want to test real
quick is just the app integration. So I downloaded the app on my phone
and look at that. Super easy to use. It found the light right away. It's like, no problem. This is fantastic. Now the one last thing that I want to test is whether or not
we can break into the Philips hue walled garden and get these lights synched up with all the other lights
here in my office. So give me a second. I going to try and model
my way through that. Okay, Check it out. It took me a few minutes to get it set up,
but it was actually remarkably easy. This is my Philips Hue remote that
I used to control all the lights here. My office power off and it goes off. It's actually a couple of seconds behind,
but power on and then it comes on. So the way it works
is it actually connects to one of the Philips
Hue lights in your setup and basically steals
the signal, go into it and replicates it. So it just mimics one of the other
lights here and it's on a slight delay. You can actually play with the delay
if you want it. Let's see, what about if I set this down
to every 1000 milliseconds? It's a better now, the little bit, a little bit better. It's better coming back on. So it honestly kind of depends. I'm sure I can tinker with it
for a little bit and get it better. Man, I am pumped on that. One quick disclaimer
I want to throw out there is that this wiring setup
is just temporary. If you're going to do this at home,
make sure you take a little bit more time and properly seal all your wires,
crimp them better, all that fun stuff. This is just a temporary setup
strictly for testing. I'm actually moving in a week, so I have
some fun plans for these in my new place. But yeah, we didn't look at that. We solved all three major gripes
that I have with LED lighting. No more crazy inaccurate colors, bit of a cavity,
no more flicker, which is huge for me. That means I'm going to make my own DIY
lighting solutions for my studio. And then three, no more closed source janky software
that you can't trust on your home network. Huge. Thank you to all my Patreon supporters
and I will see you guys in the next video. Oh and links for everything
in the video description. See?
