ChrisParkerTech

Great advice! I should have realized this would be a better solution since I did this technique with my LED lamps and it worked really well. Thanks for the suggestion!

This turned out amazing! I love to see people taking my idea and making it bigger. 12x12 is a lot more work but it looks so good I think it was worth it 😉

Yep!

Most power supplies come with a matching female dc barrel jack. Strip two wires and screw them into the holes on the back of the female jack. Then solder the positive to 5v and negative to ground of the strips. Make sure the ground of the strips is connected to the ground of the arduino. If your power supply didn’t come with a female dc barrel jack then you should search on amazon for one. They’re usually the same universal size

That’s for an unfinished music visualizer mode. It will eventually sample an on board microphone but I couldn’t get it working

Make sure you have the correct board and port selected before you hit upload. If that still doesn’t work try uploading an example sketch. If the example won’t upload there might be an issue with your board.

The LEDs connect to pin 8!

In the code there is a section that’s commented out for testing. If you comment out the main code and I comment the testing code it should light all the LEDs one at a time. For this you won’t need an external power supply and you can just use the 5v and gnd of the arduino. If you have the power supply hooked up I always like to test the the “colorPallete” example that comes with the FastLED library. To find this in the arduino IDE click file>examples>fastLED>colorPallete. You’ll have to change the LED pin and the number of LEDs but other than that it should work!

Yes only two legs get connected. When I strip the wire I’m just removing some of the cover to expose the wire underneath, not cutting it in half. You could cut the wire into small sections but it would take a lot longer to come t everything. I found it way easier to just leave it as one long wire and strip little sections out.

I don't have any better pictures but I can try to explain it a little more clearly. Start by cutting 16 lengths of wire, 8 for the rows and 8 for the columns. I used different colors for clarity but it doesn't really matter. Strip each wire so that there are solder points at each end and evenly spaced to allow 8 buttons to be attached to each wire.Solder a button at each point of the matrix, connecting each button to one row wire and one column wire. Each button has four legs that short when the button is pushed, but the legs across from each other are always shorted so you'll need to be careful. In general I always use legs diagonal from each other to make sure I'm not accidentally creating a closed loop. To test your circuit before gluing everything down, use the continuity test feature…

I don't have any better pictures but I can try to explain it a little more clearly. Start by cutting 16 lengths of wire, 8 for the rows and 8 for the columns. I used different colors for clarity but it doesn't really matter. Strip each wire so that there are solder points at each end and evenly spaced to allow 8 buttons to be attached to each wire.Solder a button at each point of the matrix, connecting each button to one row wire and one column wire. Each button has four legs that short when the button is pushed, but the legs across from each other are always shorted so you'll need to be careful. In general I always use legs diagonal from each other to make sure I'm not accidentally creating a closed loop. To test your circuit before gluing everything down, use the continuity test feature of a multi-meter. If you connect to a row and column and hear the beep when no button is pushed it means your connection is shorted and you'll either need to switch the button at that row and column or you soldered it wrong.Now that you've tested everything you can solder jumper wires to each row and column to connect them to the arduino. You'll need 16 jumper wires in total, I used 8 male to male jumpers and cut the in half, then soldered on different length extension wires so they would all meet in the bottom left corner where my board is.The button matrix was the hardest part of the whole project and it took me almost 5 hours to do all the work but the result was worth it. Hopefully this helps and you can always feel free to ask more questions. Good luck!

The button matrix is definitely the hardest part of this project (not necessarily difficult, just time consuming). Basically I made an 8x8 grid of tact switches. Each switch has four little legs and when the button is pushed, all four legs are shorted. The grid is made with 8 vertical and 8 horizontal strips of wire, one for each row and column. Each button is soldered to its corisponding row wire on one leg, and column wire on the leg diagonal from the other. When the button is pushed, it will short the two wires together. Each row wire and column wire is then connected to an io port on the arduino. The code can detect which button is pushed by checking which io pins are shorted together. Let me know if you need any more help, good luck!

Glad you like the project! Best thing about WLED is definitely the flexibility

Thanks! I’m glad you like it!

Look up WLED. It's a really easy to set up and use wifi interface for esp boards. You'll still have to solder the LEDs ina grid like I do in this project but you won't have to worry about any coding and the app is super easy to use!

That tile looks like it will work much better than the ones I designed. I used 3 rolls of size 5m 30leds/m. If you use the link on my website you just have to find this option in the size dropdown menu. I got the black color because it was cheapest but that part doesn’t really matter.

I used the type of wire stripper that clamps and strips the wire when you squeeze. There’s a link to the specific one on my website chrisparker.tech or in the description of my YouTube video

The LEDs only draw that much current at full white max brightness. Most of my functions use the HSV color scale so at max brightness each LED pulls between .02 and .04 amps. The rainbow function st max brightness pulls the most power and it pulls almost exactly 10 amps. A bigger power supply would be safer but I was trying to keep my budget as small as possible!

Make sure your code sets the LEDs to their max brightness. The tiles should diffuse the light well if the LEDs are bright enough.

Rather than buy a new 5v 10a power supply, I used two 5v 5a supplies I already had and wired them in parallel. Works the same but doesn’t look as clean.

Instead of buying a 5v 10 amp supply like I described I used two 5v 5 amp supplies I already had in parallel. It’s effectively the same

No issues so far. I never have it on for more than a couple hours though

This is a great suggestion! Clicking each tile 8 times gets pretty annoying

Thanks so much for the support!