WLED for Beginners in 2022 (PLUG n' PLAY!)

what's up smart homers my name is aaron in today's video i'm going to give you a simple guide for beginners to set up their own wled project and integrate it with homelessness a lot of times when people start with led strip lighting they buy the cheapest light strips they can find and the cheapest controllers often the controllers are smart life or magic home controllers and while they may work a lot of times people want to get into the more complex lighting effects in my opinion the best way to do this is to skip right over gobi and go right for wled the simplest way to get up and running with wled is to buy a controller that has wled already pre-installed buy some led strips plug in a power supply and you're good to go follow along with me as i replace an old govi light strip on my door frame with a wled setup the first step in any light strip project of course is to choose your light strip there are tons of different options as i'm sure you're aware but for the best lighting effects you want a strip that has individually addressable leds the type i recommend are ws-2812b light strips if you want to know more about all the different types of light strips and the differences between them i'm going to recommend a video by the hookup i'll leave a link in the description that goes over those differences in detail typically you can order ws2812b light strips with a couple different configurations you can choose the length of the strip in meters typically you can choose the led density that's the number of leds per meter and you can also choose the ip rating for weather resistance i don't care about weather resistance because i'm installing mine inside the other two things are going to be important for choosing a power supply in the next step a little rule of thumb that i found is that if you want to do ambient lighting where a light reflects off a surface and that's what you see you're going to want to go with a high density of leds an easy way to make an led backlight or ambient light look cheap is to be able to distinguish the individual sources of light on the reflective surface it just looks so bad the higher the led density the less discernible those individual points of light are going to be and the better effect you're going to have however the higher the density the more power will be required for my setup i chose a 5 meter strip which just fits around the door frame and i chose 60 leds per meter for my led density all right so next you're going to need to choose a power supply for your setup ws2812b led strips require a 5 volt supply but you're going to need to determine how much current or power is required in order to power your strips each pixel and an rgb led strip are actually made up of three different leds a red a green and a blue and they use the maximum power when they're set at full brightness and at white because of the white color in an rgb led strip is actually the red green and blue all on at the same time to create a white color for ws2812b strips each pixel has a red a green and a blue led and each led will use 20 milliamps at full brightness this means that if the pixel is red only at full brightness it's going to be using 20 milliamps if all three leds are on at full brightness it's going to be using 60 milliamps what you need to do is do the math to determine how much current your entire strip is going to need so for example my 5 meter long strip with 60 leds per meter is going to have a total of 300 leds if i set my strip to a white color at full brightness it's going to use 60 milliamps per led times 300 which comes out to 18 amps if you multiply the 18 amps by 5 volts dc you're looking at a 90 watt power supply i bet that's a lot more than you expected but before you freak out remember that it's highly unlikely first of all that you're ever going to set this strip at white because you would have bought a different strip that has white leds if you're using it as accent lighting especially in a room you probably will not be using it at full brightness as with this led density that's super bright and having it really bright becomes distracting which defeats the purpose of accent lighting to give you a good idea my desk setup that i showed earlier uses an 8 amp or 40 watt power supply even with this limited power supply i still don't use that strip at the full brightness that it can go to because it would just be too distracting on top of this most of the effects that you're going to end up using with the wled controller won't have all of the leds on at the same time so the current draw shouldn't be as high for my door frame project i'm going to go with a 8 amp 40 watt power supply because there's no way that even with that i want to have full brightness i actually tried to use a 75 watt power supply just for fun but it was a dud from amazon so i ended up just going with the 40 watt you may need to try multiple supplies if you either under or oversize your supply either you figured out you don't need as much brightness as you thought or you want to be brighter than it is but that 60 milliamps per pixel is really a good way to start okay so the last thing you need to do is choose the controller that you want to use for your setup there are a ton of different options for controller that you can then install wled software onto like d1 minis and node mcus but if you're new to this stuff a better way is to buy a controller that already has wled installed on it an example of this is this atom high power addressable rgb led controller they cost about 20 bucks not including shipping and unlike some of the other options it comes with a neat little case it's described as a high power addressable led strip controller because it allows a max current of 16 amps for your led strip power this should be plenty of power for me because i'm only using an 8 amp power supply another option for controller that has wled pre-installed is actually a controller called a digiuno that you can buy from dr z's if you do he has a series of videos where he shows how you can set up wled on his little controllers whatever you choose you got to follow the instructions for the device you're using but if you choose the atham or a did you know from dr z's it should be pretty much the same and it's a lot easier because there's no installing of software for my door project i'm going to be using the athem controller to get the device set up you're going to need to apply power to do that i'm using a two wire dc adapter and connecting the two leads from that to the terminals of the controller of course your power supply should not be plugged in at this point i could also use the two terminal dc adapter that came with the power supply but then i have to run wires from those two terminals to the terminals on the controller next connect the power supply in order to power up the controller at this point you need to check your phone or your pc for a wireless access point that has wled in the name click or tap it to connect to it once connected it should automatically connect you to the device and it should show you the wled welcome screen tap the wi-fi settings button and here you should enter your wi-fi's ssid and password and also change the mdns address to something that's easy to remember this address that you're changing is the one you're going to type into your browser in order to access this device in the future setting this prevents needing to remember the device's ip and type that into your browser also change the ap name for future connections to the device if it ever fails to connect to your wi-fi for some reason it's going to broadcast an access point with this name and you'll know which wld controller is failing to connect and then you can connect to it and change whatever settings are needed press save and connect and now the controller should connect to your wi-fi network now you can do one of two things you can either type in the mdns address of that wled controller into your browser to access it or you can use the wled app and search for new devices in the wld app tap the plus icon in the corner to add a new device and then tap discover lights and it should find your new device next let's configure the device based on the specs of our leds in the configuration menu tap led preferences you'll see the led count but it's incorrect so we're going to change that a little further down check the enable auto brightness limiter as this will prevent you from making the strip so bright that it draws more power than the power supply can handle next set the maximum current for the maximum that the supply could handle in my case i chose an 8 amp power supply so i would enter 8 000 milliamps into the box next it asks for the led voltage which is 5 volts should already be set there and if so leave it finally down in the hardware setup selection choose the led type and color order in my case i would choose ws281x for the type and grb i already know is the color order we can test this color order out later to see if it's correct so if you don't know just leave it whatever is set by default set the led count to the number you determined earlier if you only estimated this number and you guessed too high you may not realize it and wled won't tell you but it thinks there's more leds than there are if you want you can reduce your estimate by 10 and then later see how many leds aren't being used and add that number i have approximately 288 leds so i'm going to set it at 280 for now there are quite a few other options on this page and i haven't even explored all of them but in order to keep this simple we're not going to look at any of the other options and we're going to just continue on once you're done press the save button to save the settings okay next we need to connect our led strip to a controller but first let's unplug the power to the controller the controller comes with a three wire connector that will work nicely with our ws2812b strip so first we need to strip the connector wires back a bit and then secure them into the screw terminals of the controller there are three wires on the light strip a red a green and a white for my strip the red is the power wire and should be connected to the vcc terminal the green is the data wire and should connect to the dat terminal and the white is the ground once connected to the terminals i can then connect the strip to the connector and restore power to the controller if you aren't seeing your led strip light up at this point it probably means you've got a couple of the wires swapped check it by looking at the led strip and seeing how the wires come off of each channel on the strip and if that differs when it comes to the connector itself all right that's pretty much it for the initial setup now you should see your led strip light up in the wled app you can try setting the color and see what happens to the strip if the colors are correct you don't need to change anything but if they aren't go back into the led preferences and you can adjust the color order like i showed earlier in the drop down menu now is probably a good time to go ahead and install your led strip once installed you can go ahead and play around with some of the colors and the effects that wled has to offer wled has a whole tab dedicated to effects where there's an entire list of effects that you can choose and play around with you can choose the effect speed the effect intensity and in the color palette you can choose not only a single color but a palette of colors that the effect will then use there are thousands of combinations and it's going to take a while for you to find the one that you like best my personal favorite is called sign lawn integrating your device with home assistant is super easy click configuration devices and services and then in the integrations page you should see wled automatically be discovered click to add the device and then choose an area if you want and you're good to go the device page for wled is super cool and home assistant it allows you to change the color palette color effect intensity and speed of the effect and much more one of the coolest features is the ability to update the controller's firmware directly from that page it'll tell you if your controller is in need of an update and if it is just press the update button and wait a minute for the update to happen another cool thing you can do is click visit device which takes you to the ip address of that device showing you the wled user interface if you prefer to use that it's a seamless way to transition from home assistant to the actual wled user interface i think this is such a cool feature anyway i think that's where i'm gonna stop i've had wled for quite a while but there's still tons for me to learn i hope this video has helped you jump into the world of wled especially for those of you who aren't too comfortable with installing custom firmware on a controller and things like that wled is no longer for the people who are super tech savvy this is a simple out-of-the-box solution that has a ton more features than something you would get even from brands like govi and i highly recommend it if you enjoyed it please like the video and let me know in the comments if you have cool ideas for how you're using wled in your setups if you have a cool wled setup that you want to show me reach out to me on social media i'd love to see it also i'll be doing more guides like this as well as device reviews and automation idea videos so if you like what you saw please consider subscribing and pressing the bell to be notified when my next video comes out anyway thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: Make It Work

Views: 288,084

Keywords: wled, led, ledstrip, ledlights, lightstrips, strip lights, accent lighting, smart lighting, smart home, home assistant, smart life, magic home, govee, ws2812, ws2812b, rgb, effect, sinelon, rainbow, pulse, make it work, athom, controller, power supply, ip30

Id: FvPuiWTE6ic

Length: 14min 37sec (877 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 08 2022