Blinking LED Mood lighting

Well I saw another instructable ( Fuzzy Logic Mood light )and was very inspired and decided the I wanted to take that idea and go a little further! This is a Piece of sheet metal with 48 blinking LEDs mounted in it, when it is laid on a table or aimed at a wall it gives a nice illusion of light reflecting off of water. But also it is cool to take a fogged piece of glass and put it over the top of it and it makes a very cool party looking piece of art!!
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Step 1: Materials needed

Alright so I am sorry that I don't have a bunch of pictures of the materials needed, I accidentally deleted a bunch of pictures off of the camera that I had taken of the materials and parts needed. So I will make a list and try to add pictures later!

So here is a list of the Materials that I used and where I got them:

Blue Blinking LEDs ( Best HongKong )

Resistors ( Best HongKong )

Copper Metal Foil Tape (Micheal's Arts and Crafts)

Poster Board (Micheal's Arts and Crafts)

Old Phone Charger ( I just wrote a staff email at my work and had everyone bring there old phone chargers in, now I have a stock pile different voltage chargers!)

Piece of sheet metal (Home Depot, Lowe's, probably any hardware store)

Four Small Bolts with Nuts (Home Depot, Lowe's, probably any hardware store)

Four Small Rubber Caps that fit over the ends of the Bolts (Home Depot, Lowe's, probably any hardware store)

Comments

[MuselinMilan]

great job, but i don`t understant why the leds are blinking,it is not normal to stay on????

[seligtobiason]

Well the standard LED is a solid lit LED. But I specifically purchase blinking LED's for this project!

[FatherKino]

I see this is an old project. . Have you noticed if the LEDs dim after prolonged use? I made a LED night light and notice after a week of use, the lights had noticably dimmed. Do you get around that problem by using blinking LEDs?

[seligtobiason]

My LED's have not dimmed at all, still nice and bright. I don't think that using blinking LED's have kept them from dimming though. The main thing that causes dimming in LED's is to much power going to them, so maybe try using I higher resistance. Another thing is the quality of the LED's themself, now a days these things are so mass produced that the quality can be lost. Main thing is double check what resistors you should be using! Hope that helps.

[DiyProjects]

haha i wonder what rgbs would look like

[luckyvictor]

Why does it blink randomly?? wouldn't the LEDs stay on while there is a power supply?

[seligtobiason]

These LED's are actually made to blink, it is part of their construction. You can buy many different kinds of LED's, from steady on, RGB flashing or Fading LED's, these LED's are just made to blink! They all blink at random times because the construction of the LED's are not each exactly the same so they have a little different speeds of blinking.

[misteravocado5]

 How do you hook up the phone charger?

[seligtobiason]

On the phone charger there is a positive and negative wire, so you just solder the positive wire to the positive copper tape, and do the same with the Negative.  If you are not sure which is the positive and negative, you can do a test with LED's, make sure you use the correct resistor for the test though so you don't burn out the test LED.

[bluepills]

What exacly is a poster board? I'm from quebec a french province in Canada and that is something i've never heard of. I made a quick search throught ebay and on google and it won't come up with anything close to your board. Is it mandatory or can i use anything else to hold the led in place, perharps plexiglass will do the trick?

Thanks and great instructable!!

[coltx1]

poster board is just thin cardboard or real thick paper. try wal-mart's school supply dept or any craft store. it's realy cheap.

[lamboboy732]

 wow it looks really professional. Nice Job!

[PAKIS-RULEZ]

hi bro i have a question can we use the same thing but make it react to music ? if so please tell me the circuit diagram for it if possible instead of symbols please put the pictures of the actual component i am trying to make something that react to music but on a large scale like your project please help thanks in advance.

[justinacan]

Yes just hook it strate up to the amp out puts and change the settings on the filters intill u get the frequence u want

[seligtobiason]

hey there, so I am sure there is a way to make something like this to react to sound, but that would be an entire different project. There are many instructables on how to make your LED's react to music, so I would suggest searching for one of those. Here is one for example:

http://www.instructables.com/id/Add-sound-reactive-LEDs-for-any-speakers/

[PAKIS-RULEZ]

lol i found this one

http://www.instructables.com/id/Blinking_LEDs_to_Music/

and made it i have yt vid link there i ncomments

thanks a bunch now i will try it on a bigger scale :D

[scris101]

what kind of resistors? 

[seligtobiason]

well it depends on your Power supply, for the supply that I used... I used 1/4 watt 150 Ohm resistors.

You can go to led.linear1.org/led.wiz  and figure out which resistors you need, It is a VERY handy website, I use it all the time!  I hope this helps, if you have anymore questions please let me know!

[mightyhogan]

did you just solder the pos and neg ends of the charger to the foil tape?

[seligtobiason]

Yup! sure did, easy as that! just make sure you have them in the right order before soldering!

[mightyhogan]

hey man first let me say thanks for all the help i really appreciate it this thing is starting to look sweet i'll upload some pics when i'm done. but one more question, do you have a rec. on what voltage of charger to use so as not to fry the leds? i noticed you used a 5v

[seligtobiason]

well it doesn't really matter on what voltage you put into the board as long as you have the correct Resistors. So you can use the LED calculator and put in your info for whatever voltage you have and then you can get what resistors you need. What power supply are you currently using? What resistors do you have right now?

[mightyhogan]

thanks again for the quick response. i'd love to see if my leds and resistors are right b4 i solder. so i followed another one of your instrucatbles (great too btw) and ordered 5mm blue blinking leds and 150ohm resistors. will these work with either a 7v or 9 v phone charger or ethernet power supply?

[seligtobiason]

Well again, the resistors really depend on what voltage you use, so if you change the voltage, or the amount of LED's in parallel then the resistors will need to change too. Take a look at the LED calculator ( http://led.linear1.org/led.wiz ) and plug in the info that you are wanting to do an it will let you know exactly what resistors to use and how to wire them up. If you are not sure about what to put into the calculator click on the little "?" marks and they will give you an explanation.

Take a look at that website and go from there, if you are still not sure you can email me your info (how many LED's, what voltage you are using, along with the Ohms available on you power supply) and I can help you out.

[mightyhogan]

ok so i tried to use the calc but the wiring diagrams that they give me a pretty confusing. i was hoping to use the copper tape in the same scheme you had to wire it up. its suggesting wiring two leds togetther pos to neg and the the neg of one to the resistor. i just dont understand how i would lay the tape. Here the break down; esp. if i try for a 3 or 4 row scheme piece of sheet metal 12/24 hoping for 3 rows of leds 4in apart or 4 rows 3 inches apart horizontally and 8 comlumns of leds vertically so either 24 or 32 leds so; 24 or 32 5mm leds.3.3-3.4v 20ma with a 7.7v 700ma power source. your help is greatly appreciated man, i cant thank you enough

[seligtobiason]

Well, I am sorry that the calculator is a bit confusing... you just need to get a little creative with it, figure out how you can get the answers you want.

SO going off of that, you want to have it the same basic setup that I was using, which is one resistor to each LED... so that means that you need to know what resistor to use with that power source to power one LED.... which when you think about it, when you put in the number of LED's in the calculator just put ONE! Easy as that, now you know what resistors to use.

If you were to do what is explained above the calculator would tell you that a 220 Ohm 1/4 watt resistor would be the correct fit.... so just go out and buy one resistor per LED and you got it! Hope that helps, and when it comes to problem solving, you need to think outside the box!

[riccolesmana]

Well, I tried it. And no luck. I use just the NORMAL LED, not the BLINKING LED. lol ~ btw the another way is using transistor.

[seligtobiason]

Well there are many ways to get this effect, I wanted to create the most simple way, so then anyone can create this look without much experience!

[riccolesmana]

Well, I'm bad at my physic studies (and I hadn't get any lesson for electricity yet). I rly need some help. This project will coming up for science fair project. How does the LEDs blinking? Without any software/programming.

[seligtobiason]

There are many different kinds of LED's, in this case I just bought LED's that blink! So... no need for software or programing! They blink when you get them@

[mightyhogan]

hi i'm building this at home (great instructable btw), i'm new to elec. and led and had kinda a lame question, how can i tell which is positive and which is neg? sorry i just dont want to do it backwards and have non working lights.

[seligtobiason]

Well the two leads/wires, coming out of the LED's are positive and negative. In general they make the longer of the two leads the positive and the shorter one negative, so just think on Positive as longer, and negative as shorter. But most definitely test your LED's and make sure they work before soldering them all into place, it is not fun to have to rip it apart to replace an LED. If you have any more questions please let me know! OH and when its done I would love to see some pictures and/or video!

[iBito]

What would be the best size for a smaller version of this? Do you think a 9" x 7" version of this would have the same effect? I'm moving and this is the best lighting idea I have found so far other than the ceiling lights. I was thinking of making it into somewhat of a lamp...

[seligtobiason]

Really you can make this any size you want, you just need to decide on the number of LED's and the distance between each LED that you want. I made it this size because I liked the size of the metal piece, so then I figured out the distance I needed to make the LED's etc..

[patchrules2000]

the rusting is probably because there is allot of moisture in the air and the electricity is charging the metal plate enabling it to rust faster than usual (allot faster) however I don't know why you would want to get rid of it because it makes it look allot better than just plain metal. oh well just my 2 cents :)

[catz369]

How do you add the charger to it?I'm new at all this and trying to learn.

[seligtobiason]

Well out of the charger there are two wires, one is the positive and one is the negative. While the charger is unplugged, cut the end off of the cord and strip back the cord so the wires are exposed... then if you have a tester you can find out which is positive and which is negative. OR just take the two ends and temporarily attach them to the positive and negative of the project. then plug it in, if it lights up then you got it right! If it doesn't light up, just unplug the cord and switch the leads and plug back in! I hope this helped, if you have anymore questions please let me know! thanks

[NetReaper]

Could you just use a 3v wall wart? What should the amps be?

[nickademuss]

Im building a model of the Titanic and im going to lite it from the inside with LEDs, I need a circuit to drive sections of the ship and slowly turn off one deck or room at a time randomly, then stop and turn on all of them at once. Can a simple circuit be built for that? Or will I need to use say a Basic stamp controller? Any input would be helpful. Thanks!

[abirchall]

Hey, Do you mind letting us know the size and brightness rating of the LEDs you used for this project?