LED room lighting.
So I recently got back into 3D animation and design and have been quite bored in between lengthy renders and decided to take a stab at home lighting and automation as a filler hobby for my rediscovered... other... hobby. I have started to add LED lighting to random pieces of furniture with some parts a buddy gave me last fall. It's all quite simple stuff as it is now but I plan to keep adding gear to allow for DMX control over WiFi so the lighting can be adjusted from a phone, iPad or even when not at home.
So here is the really simple pinout for the control and power on the LED strips. These connect from a 12v dimmer module for power and control. It also has an IR receiver for a little remote.
Here are the LEDs working after soldering the wires. You can also see the remote.
Here is my coffee table with all the glass removed to install the LED strip. You can also see the little dimmer module there.
This is what to table looks like all lit up pre cleaning.
And here is the room all lit up. I used the same process on the cabinet with the frosted glass on the right.
Once I have some spare cash floating around I will start to implement a better control system and I'll keep updating this. Might be a while though.
So here is the really simple pinout for the control and power on the LED strips. These connect from a 12v dimmer module for power and control. It also has an IR receiver for a little remote.
Here are the LEDs working after soldering the wires. You can also see the remote.
Here is my coffee table with all the glass removed to install the LED strip. You can also see the little dimmer module there.
This is what to table looks like all lit up pre cleaning.
And here is the room all lit up. I used the same process on the cabinet with the frosted glass on the right.
Once I have some spare cash floating around I will start to implement a better control system and I'll keep updating this. Might be a while though.
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I thought about making up some business cards and doing some projects for some friends I have locally, but it's just a matter of actually doing it.
http://www.aliexpress.com/category/390501/led-lighting.html
Here is where all my stuff comes from. The shipping is outrageous but the parts are all from China, which seems like a bad thing but it is the same stuff you get from higher priced websites all a way lower cost with slightly higher shipping. The selection is huge. Send me a pic of your curio and I can help you get the parts you need.
Thank you, Sir. Added the link in an edit.
Also, related
I have a back ground in theatrical lighting so the route I am going to take with the actual control portion of things is through something known as DMX. DMX is a relatively easy thing to learn and a basic understanding of signal flow is really the only thing needed to get you started on this stuff. There are one or two open source theatrical lighting consoles (like chamsysusa.com/magicq)that can be run on Windows, Linus and OSX. I am planning to get an USB to DMX adapter to start with before I venture down the road with WiFi and ArtNET stuff.
I'm absolutely sure you could also integrate a lighting system with Crestron products or many other home automation systems, but their gear is pretty steep in price.
So far, what I understand is that with the software you control the output of a dimmer like this through a USB interface like this. That would work for a strip like this. But what about all the colour and pattern control on a strip like this? I guess that would require a more complex dimmer? Or maybe the controller it's hooked into is the only thing that can do it, and it'd either have to just happen to be DMX compatible or I just can't use it?
Hopefully I'll have a chance to tool around with the software a bit this weekend just to see what it's like.
--edit--
I just spoke with a buddy of mine here at work, and he says he's glanced at it a bit. He mentioned something called the Zigby (sp?) protocol, and that he's seen stuff for controlling these sorts of things with a Raspberry Pi. If I can find information on it, I think I might have found a purpose for my currently-collecting-dust RPi
--edit--
I was also thinking, and it seems to me like if one simply unwired one of those colour-changer-thinger USB strips from the controller and rewired it onto a protocol-compatible controller, there shouldn't be any issues assuming it can output the required current. Of course, I'm sure the strip could be purchased without the controller to begin with, but it couldn't hurt to have it sitting around. Also, it seems that with one of those controllers (I'm talking about the cheapish IR-controlled multi-coloured USB light controllers whose remotes you seem to see everywhere now) you could wire in other similar multi-coloured LED strips (question: how does one make sure to find these sorts of LED strips? Is it just a three-rail thing with R, G, and B on separate rails?) and control them with it pretty easily. In fact, expanding on that, it shouldn't even be that difficult to amp the output to control significantly more than the controller(dimmer, not controller, right?) was originally connected to...
Maybe I'll hold off on the expensive adapters and remote control software and just hack one of these IR controlled dimmers...
----wow, that's some serious stream-of-consciousness posting there...
http://www.adamhaile.net/projects/raspberrypi-led-strip-control/
It uses a library and scripts written in python for LPD8806 addressable LED strips. I think I'll give this a shot. If it seems to work pretty well (the demo video on his site is kinda cool) I might dig into it harder. I've already found some cool resources.
So I guess I will go into a little detail about DMX as I am sure these dimmers operate in a similar manner. Each fixture require a specific amount of DMX channels on that DMX universe (one universe equals 512 channels). Say fixture A uses 4 channels, 1 for red, 2 for green, 3 for blue and 4 for overall intensity. Each channel can accept a range of intensity value from 0 to 255. So to make a blue light, channel 3 on that DMX universe would be at 255 as well a the overall intensity channel 4. Raising or lowering different intensities on channels 1 through 3 will allow you to mix the colors and channel 4 controls how bright they are. This can be used on fixtures and dimmers with as many or as little DMX channels as they come with. So the dimmer I am looking at for myself controls 8 RGB LED strips requiring a total of 24 channels of DMX.
So I imagine that these cheapo dimmers use something similar to that to control the color of light on the LED strip, I just don't know what it is. I do imagine there are ways to use over controllers on them but I am not sure that they are. I have about 4 feet on the LED strip I got so I might play around a bit and see if I can make it work with something other than the dimmers I got with them.
I wonder if there is lighting console software I could get for RPi so I wouldn't have to run this system off my server? When I get home from work I'll check out more of the links you posted. I think the more the two of us combine our knowledge on this type of project, the cooler the project will become.
We will be the winners at lights.
Step 2: Learn Python
Step 3: Learn Chinese
Step 4: ?
Step 5: Profit!
I also stumbled across This which looks like another viable option for the pi, just uses a little more hardware.