This is not a new project. At least not for me, it is just entered into the Hackaday.io recently.

This project log is about the lighting part of the project.

I started to design and built it almost a year ago. The orginal idea was the following:

build a 48 chanel LED controller (16 RGB channels) around a TI TLC5955, and drive the 16 LED strips from it.

This means that the LEDs in the strips are connected in serial, need "high voltage" (36V) and not individualy adressible. I went even further. Built the controller and 10 out of the 16 LED bars.

And the project was abandoned here. I not even tried the controller out (this is because my regular fear to switch on something I built first time). The project was lying around in its project box until recently. I was mainly working on my CNC Motor controller.

This project had a "deadline" few weeks before it, I restarted to work on it (even knowing that I clearly will miss the deadline). I realized, that the TLC5955 based driver is not a good idea:

- The LEDs are not individualy addressible

- There is no software library/sample code availiable what I can build uppon

- Two channel power supply needed (36V, 5V) for the whole device

So I switched to the common WS2812B LEDs.

Downloaded the chip's datasheet from Adafruit, and designed the lightbar. Even I almost etched the boards. (Un)fortunately I wasn't able to create a good etching mask on the first two try, so the copper clad board was lying around on my desk for a while.

Then the ordered chips arrived. Opened the first one and a big surprise blown into my face. This LEDs has 4 pins, I expected 6.

What they sent??? ...

...exactly what I ordered.

I wasn't care about the meaning of the B at the end of the chip marking. The datasheet what I downloaded is for the WS2812 and not the WS2812B. Great.

Redesigned the board. This time I gave up the idea to put all of the light bars on a single rather large board. Intead made two designs:

- One for the home grown PCB

- One for the PCB shop

I built the one on the home PCB for testig.

And I want to order the final version.

The reasons why I didn't done it yet:

I've an old design, from one of my old projects, where I made a mistake and the board should be reordered. The lightbar design need 26x100mm board space (two of it, adds to 20 pieces). This design need 50x100mm. This two can be easily combined, and the cost is the 100x100mm boards cost anyway. Even I already added them to a single board (there is three lightbars, but I just need two).

My dilema:

- If I add just two lightbars, a 20x100mm area left what can be used for the USB Booster, when I can come up with a new design

- Black or White? I would use white for the lightbars because of the additional reflection. I would use green or black for the additional panel, but definetly not White.

It would be great if the boards arrive soon, but I can't work on the USB Booster before August...