LED Board

I was looking for a solution to brighten up my room. I wanted something that was unique, nice, power efficient, customizable and could DIY. I found a video on YouTube that gave me the idea to make my own LED board room light. Because of my novice skills, I had to be rather modest with my requirements with the first version, but over the years I upgraded it to tick all the boxes. The first version only contained white LED strips and could only be dimmed.

I’ve met and started using WS2812B LED ICs. These are 5V supplied serial latch ICs which means they can be stringed and each of them can be addressed individually with only one digital line. Most importantly they can be bought in strip form as well.

A more complex control interface was also required, a simple potentiometer was not enough anymore. At first I started to develop my own website based UI on an ESP32. After implementing many features and effects, I realized that there might be people who already done this and found the WLED project. This was the first time I learned about opensource projects.

Last upgrade I made on it was to change the logo’s backlight to a proper high density PCB based LED strip. The old janky one was falling apart and the LEDs were not evenly distributed. Intensity was also too low and the logo was too dimm. At the time I was deeply into PCB desing and manufacturing so I could solve this without much overhead.

Later I built a set of boards like this one for my brother.