RGB LED Mood lighting

Step 8 Wireing it up!

Lets start wiring and soldering!!

Start off by flipping the whole thing over so you can see all the LED leads sticking up out of the main board. Take a look at the LED leads, bend all of the positive leads (longer leads) one direction, and then all of the negative leads (shorter leads) the other direction. It is very important that this is correct or else some of the LED's will not light up.

For Junction points or soldering points I used copper tape, you don't have to do this. Rather you can just solder the wires and resistors straight together, I did this because for me it was quicker and cleaner.

You will want to place one copper strip under the Positive lead so you can solder the positive lead to the strip. You can look at the image below.

The Negative lead will have a resistor soldered to it, so I placed the copper strip at a right angle to the right of the lead. This was so I could solder the resistor to the negative lead, then the other side of the resistor to the copper tape. You can see in the images below.

Once that is set up, you need to decide on how many LED's you want to put on the power source(s), I choose to use two 9 volt batteries. So that makes it 13 LED's on one battery, and 12 LED's on the other. You could use a plug in power source if you like, then you could put them all on one circuit.

Then just start throwing in some wires connecting all of the positive copper tapes together, and all of the negative copper tapes together. Figure out where you want the switch, and where to mount the batteries, then solder the negative end of the battery holder to one of the negative copper tape tabs. And solder the positive to a positive copper tape tab.

At this point you should be able to plug in the batteries, or your wall plug and see the beauty of 25 little boxes changing colors lighting up a room!

Comments

[acarballo]

So how do you turn it on? i mean...do i have to get my hands inside of it and clip the batteries or does it have a button or something?

[seligtobiason]

In the Instructable it is just setup to pop the batteries in and out, but that did get annoying so I just put in a switch to the side to turn it on and off.

[acarballo]

Im kind of new to electronics, if i wanted to add a switch for both of the circuits (top RGB and bottom RGB) where should i put the switch?

[seligtobiason]

Hey there, sorry about the delay in response. So since there are technically two power sources you can't use a standard switch, BUT they do make a switch that has two inputs and two outputs so it really is two separate switches connected together! That would be your best bet, so for a switch just attach the positive wire from the battery to the input on the switch and then a wire from the output of the switch to the positive of the LED! Easy as that!

[arturo_mc]

Hello, its me "acarballo" from before, i changed my email account with facebook and my instructables accounts got screwed, but anyway, thanks for the fast responde, and i repeat, im fairly new to electronics, so maybe you could help me out a bit on this please.

Since my local electronics store only had 16 chameleon Leds (RGB's), i bought 16 and im gonna make it 4x4, but the question is, im gonna have 2 arrays, of 8 chameleon Leds each, Should i use 150 ohms resistors and power each array with a 9V battery? or what resistors should i use? Thanks in advance for your support!

[seligtobiason]

Hello again, if you are ever in doubt of what kind of resistors to use, you should check out any LED Calculator, my favorite is this one:
http://led.linear1.org/led.wiz
It is nice, simple, and easy to use.  On that note, if your LED needs 3.4 volt 20mA and is being pulled from a 9volt battery you should use 330ohm 1/4 watt resistor for each LED.  I see I wrote 150Ohm resistors in the instructable, but that would be if you wired two LEDs to each resistor, but in the case of working with "flashing" LED's you do want a resistor to each LED.  Sorry for the confusion, and I fixed the mistake in the instructable (oops!).  Hope that answered you question, and let me know how else I can help!

[arturo_mc]

Oh sorry, i just read the part where you said that using 150 ohms is for 1 resistor every 2 led, so with that current information i should use 330 at 1/4watt for every led then right?

[arturo_mc]

Hmph, using the calculator you provided, and using, 9v as source voltage, 3.4 diode forward voltage, 20 diode forward current mA, and 8 Leds, it tells me i should use 120 ohm at 1/4 Watt for every 2 leds... im kinda lost then since you said i should use 330 Ohms for each Led D:

[seligtobiason]

Since these LED's are not one solid color they are considered "Flashing" even though they are just fading from one color to the next. So with "Flashing LED's" I have read that if is best to have one resistor per LED, which in this case of 9 volts would be the 330 Ohm 1/4 watt resistor. The confusion of the 150Ohm vs 120Ohm is that 120 Ohm is what is suggested, but I had 150 Ohm on hand so that's what I used, and you can go with higher resistance for a substitute but you should never use less resistance!

I hope that clears up everything, and again, trust the LED calculator, when in doubt with anyone's projects use the LED calc. You never know what the circumstance is with whoever is making the project, my 150 Ohm resistors is a prime example!