Its been a while since I reported on what was happening with the Pixiflood board.  I wanted to expand to powers higher than 10w and had created boards to support 20w and 30w leds that only required 24 volts which was within the component specs.

I've ran into 2 issues, one the pin spacing is different between the various LED Chips and a trend for the LED Chips moving to 30-36 volts which are outside of the 30 volt max of the PT4115, so I set out to solve those two issues and also addressed being able to connect to wifi directly from the board using an esp-01.

The esp-01 uses opensource firmware created for a device called ESPixelStick and works with E1.31 lighting software or directly with MQTT for home automation.

Last year I created a 10w version of the Pixiflood with a built in PixelStick that worked very well.  I started with that circuit and swapped out the PT4115 for another constant current driver, I've also eliminated the direct attachment of the LED to the board since this caused issues due to varied spacing requirements. By removing the direct connection and now connecting to the LED via soldered on wires, the new board is able to drive any led chip from 10w to 100w (or Higher) as long as the voltage requirement is under 60v.  All current LED chips are 36v or under so my circuit has plenty of headroom.

One of the other advantages of removing the direct connection is the trace length is less than 15% of the previous design which has yielded a significant drop in EMI and noise which has greatly improved the range of the ESP-01 wireless capabilities.  Some of the other changes was moving away from a linear voltage regulator to a switching configuration to address connections to higher voltage sources and overheating issues for the 5v circuitry.