led light bars - Construction Photojournal

I started by purchasing some 4”X4” wooden planks to act as the base structure. Shown here is a jig I made to drill straight holes in the ends, as they were too big to fit under any drill press I could get my hands on.

Here I applied a matte black coating to act as a visual base for the lights

These individually addressable LED strips can be purchased for pretty cheap on Amazon. Blindingly bright, too.

I settled on a raspberry pi to run the LED strips. I played around with an Arduino at first, but found that it got bogged down and slowed the refresh rate too much when displaying complex patterns.

The LEDs are surprisingly power hungry. These little things output 75 watts at 5 volts. Most of the wiring is completely exposed, so do NOT touch them in the wrong place. I learned that the hard way.

The next step was to develop the wiring scheme. Shown here is the schematic that I ended up with. I set it up in such a way that the light bars can be hooked up end to end.

With the expectation that these cheap LED strips may burn out after some interval, I applied them to replaceable plastic covers.

Waistbands from cut up boxers act as a great way to fixture things together for drilling in the absence of rubber bands. Lol

Here I’m testing out the power supplies to verify their functionality. 375 watts in this one photo!

At this step I was wiring up the leads to the power distribution blocks. It’s Christmas time, as you can tell in this photo.

This additional bit of circuitry here connects a microphone to the microcontroller to enable sound-reactive light effects.

That’s all, folks!