![]() You can also get them at Fry's Electronics, Radio Shack, or various places online (like this one from SparkFun: I found a good deal on a pack of 10 on eBay. I found a suitable power adapter at a local thrift store for $3, but you might have one already lying around. The one I'm using called for a 12 volt power supply capable of supplying 2 amps of current for the 5 meter strip. Check the requirements for your LED strip. This strip comes with a controller for the strip and a remote control to change the color and light pattern.Ģ) Power Supply. I used the same RGB LED strip suggested in the eat98's Instructable, which is cheap and works great for this project. I will try to provide enough information that you can customize the steps, if needed. Note that you can use substitutions for most of the parts listed here, but this Instructable will be written specifically with these parts in mind. Here's a list of what I used to do my hack. All that is required, then, is to disconnect the two ICs from the +4.7 volt power rail (by cutting the circuit board trace at the black line), tie the microcontroller to +4.7 volts and ground, and connect one of the microcontroller pins to the power pins of the two ICs on the LED controller circuit, so that the microcontroller can power the ICs at will.Ī simple and cheap PIR motion sensor can be easily connected to the microcontroller to detect motion, and the microcontroller can easily be programmed to timeout after a specific period of time. I measured the current being drawn by the two ICs at about 1 mA, which is well within the current sourcing abilities of most microcontrollers, so a transistor or MOSFET will not be needed and the ICs can be powered directly from the microprocessor. The controller is able to remember the LED settings when power is removed and reapplied, which will be very helpful. The LED controller accepts commands from the remote control, allowing the LED colors to be set and for different display patterns to be selected. There are several potential solder points (highlighted in yellow). There's also a ground plane (highlighted red in the third picture), a +12 volt power rail, and a +4.7 volt power rail (highlighted in blue). I'm guessing that the lower IC is a MOSFET control chip, which turns power on and off to each of the LED power lines (I could be wrong about this, however). It changes the LED color, does pulse-width modulation (PWM), and controls the light patterns. The upper IC in the pictures is the brains of the controller. Somehow the circuit needs to be modified to allow the microcontroller to control the power supplied to the logic portion of the LED controller circuit board.Ī quick look at the LED controller circuit board shows that there are two black ICs. ![]() This is the approach I took for this Instructable. Wire the microcontroller into the existing circuitry.To be honest, and let's be clear about this, I'm far, far too lazy to do all that work, which leaves option number. However, that's quite a lot of work and a lot of additional electronic components. This would require integrating the remote control receiver into the new microcontroller, reverse engineering the remote protocol, adding MOSFETs to control power to each of the LED channels (and, probably, a MOSFET control chip), and programming the light values and patterns into the microcontroller. Build an entirely new control circuit.The idea is to be able to add a microcontroller that can control the power to the LED strip (turn it on and off as needed), without losing the ability to control the color and pattern with the remote control. ![]() ) came with an LED controller and remote control, which I think is quite common. If you just want to get on with the instructions already, feel free to skip to the next step.) (This step is a discussion of my approach to hacking the LED strip, and may not necessarily be well described.
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