LED Bar
Overview
Features:
- 40 RGB LEDs
- 64000 colours per LED
- full brightness on each LED/colour possible
This project was inspired by some larger light effects I've seen on buildings. I decided to try aranging 40 RGB LEDs to a 1m bar and see how it looks.
Please note: I still get questions about the schematics. This was one of my earlier microcontroller based projects and is a rather questionable approach (i.e. WAY too much work). Things evolved a lot since then, so if you plan to build something similar, just use a strip of WS2812B LEDs.
Construction
The LEDs are mounted to a 1m aluminium profile (u-shaped). It was some work to solder the 120 wires...
This version did not look bad, but multi chip LEDs do not mix the colors properly, so I bought a 1m frosted acryl glass pipe. Again, not bad, but I figured out it looks best if you mount the whole pipe in front of the LEDs.
Control Unit
I used a ATMega16 for this one, controlling 15 74HC573. In order to get full brightness, I used 18 ULN2003 to sink each chip with full 20mA.