Greetings!
For the past while I have been making my own LED strips for internal case lighting. I like doing this because I can control color, brightness, length, LED type, and everything else. I've made straight monochrome strips; I've made RGB multi-strips to enable 8-bit color lighting, and I've made quite a few bright white led strips to shine like spotlights on individual components in a PC build.
I use this wizard to calculate the resistors I need for various LEDs:
http://led.linear1.org/led.wizAnd
Mouser.com to buy individual LEDs to my liking:
Horrible URL shortened by bit.ly:
http://bit.ly/1oEiaGjAnd resistors:
Horrible URL shortened by bit.ly:
http://bit.ly/1gzXq8PHowever, I have been using protoyping board stock to make my LED strips, which has a number of drawbacks:
- It is ugly.
- it requires hard wiring and lots of checking and double-checking.
- It is really hard to stick to a flat surface with double-sided tape.
- I have to cut it to size, making a horrible smell when I do it with a Dremel.
So, since I think this is something I am going to continue to do, I designed a modular PCB for through-hole LED strips. It is one-half-inch wide and 12 inches in total length, with one LED per inch. It is designed to be subdivided easily into up to four 3" strips, so you can use it to make any length between 3" and 12". It also is designed to daisy-chain easily, either with connectors or hard wiring. And because it is in sub-strips of three LEDs, you can use it for Red, Blue or White LEDs just by changing the resistor value.
FYI, individual LEDs cost 15 cents each, and resistors cost 7 cents. So a 12-LED strip would cost $2.08 in parts, and be as bright (or dim) as you like.
This is one sub-section of the PCB:
Three LED Strip PCB by samwisekoi 2014.Note that it is all-black with white lettering and proudly displays the geekhack.org site name. It is also much smaller than shown.
The entire strip of four sub-sections looks like this:
Four-segment, 12-LED Strip PCB by samwisekoi 2014.You can cut the strip between any of the double-lines or connect them by soldering wires between the positive and negative connector pads.
I am going to make about 100 12" strips., They will cost under $3.00 for a strip of four, or $0.75 per three-inch sub-strip. Including LEDs and resistors, a 12 LED strip would cost around $5 total, be any color you want, and give off up to 156,000mcd of light.
Because I use these regularly, and because the cost for a production run is optimized around 100 12" strips, I am going to have that many made.
if anyone would like some of these, reply here. If anyone thinks interest would be greater than 100 12" strips total, suggest a Group Buy, and I'll consider it.
But for now, this is just a "Making Things Together" post with the opportunity for any geekhacker who wants to pick some up welcome as well. (OCN and OC3D folks are also welcome, although this is a geekhack.org jam.)
I will take a post some photos of the strips in various configurations from my prototypes.
TL;DR If you'd like to be able to make your own LED strips, you can get some geekhack.org PCBs here. - Ron | samwisekoi
p.s. These might be interesting to use as internal and side illumination in the various Acrylic keypad and keyboard cases being made now.
