This is a LED board with 18x 1-3W LEDs for a LED light or display. Each LED had its own control pin and therefore each LED can be controlled individually. The original idea was to use MOSFETs but I didn't have any sadly but instead used NPN transistors to switch the LEDs on and off. Thankfully the NPN transistors within the same packages with the same pins but the pulldown resistors needed to be changed. This changed was to change the pulldowns resistors from parallel to series with the base pin of the transistor. This was not too hard to change.

The Light can be controlled by most microcontrollers, logic or switches circuits. The controller that I will be using to start playing is the Arduino UNO development board with the ATMEGA328P. The LED Plate needs 18 outputs and the ATMEGA328P has 20 output which makes it perfect to control all the LEDs with 2 pins leftover for controlling different functions. Sadly only 6 of the 20 output pins are PWM This can be changed to a Programmable bit-banging method for all pins but this required constant running from the microcontroller. The makes the microcontroller do nothing else besides from this PWM. The 2 control pins can also be used for DMX communications making this light into a party/stage light with different controllable functions.

This is the first time that I got an aluminum PCB manufactured from <a href="http://pcbway.com/">PCBway</a> and it turned out pretty good. I will probably be making more aluminum PCB when I need to.

<strong>Future work:</strong>
<ul>
 	<li>Putting a microcontrller on the PCB</li>
 	<li>Matrix control</li>
 	<li>PWM control</li>
 	<li>More lights</li>
 	<li>More Colors</li>
</ul>

Tinkers Projects

Tag: plate

LED Plate