Daniel writes –
“You know all those RGB LED projects with microcontrollers and power transistors and stuff?
Well, this is the almost-too-easy version.
Modern two-pin RGB LEDs are cheap and pretty, and they don’t need so much as a current limiting resistor, if the input voltage is right. Just hook ’em up to about three volts and away they go.
It’s thus trivial to install them in cars, computers, flashlights… you name it.” – Link & video.
10 thoughts on “The embarrassingly easy case mod (color LEDs)”
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This is the case with many LEDs. If you want to see a nice, simple RGB LED setup, check this out:
http://www.instructables.com/id/EAZWM7SMGAEWIFNUSK?ALLSTEPS
Only thing I don’t like is his diffuser and the packaging of the thing.
The above project actually has both current limiting resistors and transistors :-).
Coincidentally, I also did a piece on the simplest-possible-Luxeon-lighting-setup some time ago; you can find that here. Such fiddling is cheaper now (more than four years on), since you can now get genuine Luxeons for less, and there are knockoffs that are cheaper still.
I used those leds to make a nice Christmas light decoration. After a succesful try with ten leds, I ordered fifty from http://stores.ebay.it/hktaiyuen-LED-store
and completed a 30 leds light chain.
Against all elementary electronics advices I soldered them in parallel, one every 30cm of a simple tiny mains cord, then pumped in about 20mA for each led with a simple constant current generator (LM317+resistor).
Leds was plunged and glued into pinpong balls that diffuse the light (a hot melt glue blob on top of each led help a little more).
As said in the original post, led color lost syncronicity after a while, so it results in a beatiful color changing rainbow light chain.
I catched it in an one minute video with my old camcorder, hope to convert to digital and post it soon.
news flash- when you connect batteries to LEDs, they glow!
Ok, I’m an idiot. I was looking back on old articles about LEDs, and I watched the video. very nice.
The only annoying thing I can see is the losing-sync part. maybe if there was an easy way to make them fade out and reset after a time..