lb_20

Thanks for your interest in the project! The great thing about this one is that you don't need to have any skills in coding, since the logic is handled by the circuitry alone. I'd suggest you start by getting your hands on the right equipment and parts needed, then try setting it up on a breadboard (there are lots of tutorials on breadboard layouts and how to use one on Instructables). Let me know if you have any issues, I'd be happy to assist :)

Hi there,This video you have linked is a much more complicated sound reactive circuit. To develop something like this is very time intensive and many people have been working on similar things. An example of an "off the shelf" solution you can buy is something like this: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1777925564/vi... . I personally want to experiment with MSGEQ7 chip that the person you linked in the video has used, but I haven't quite got around to that type of project yet. I would suggest you get one of those graphic equaliser chips and start experimenting with that first, then the ideas will come to you for effects you want to achieve. You can do some basic tests with an Arduino or Teensy microcontroller (depending on the length of lights you want to use you might fi...

Hi there,This video you have linked is a much more complicated sound reactive circuit. To develop something like this is very time intensive and many people have been working on similar things. An example of an "off the shelf" solution you can buy is something like this: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1777925564/vi... . I personally want to experiment with MSGEQ7 chip that the person you linked in the video has used, but I haven't quite got around to that type of project yet. I would suggest you get one of those graphic equaliser chips and start experimenting with that first, then the ideas will come to you for effects you want to achieve. You can do some basic tests with an Arduino or Teensy microcontroller (depending on the length of lights you want to use you might find the Arduino doesn't have enough RAM to achieve the fast effects). Also, it's important to note that you'll need some addressable RGB LED strips, such as the WS2812's and not just a regular RGB LED strip. If you have any questions, I'll be happy to assist, but without knowing a bit more about what experience you have and what you want to achieve it's hard for me to give you much more of a detailed answer! Lili

Hey there, Sounds like something a little bit more advanced than this circuit, you would most likely have to use a microcontroller to set up something like this. You can probably have an audio lead that connects to a pin on the micro configured as an input, read that in and if it meets whatever spec you need to activate the light then set that output pin with LED high. For the audio part you can just connect the split lead to another audio lead running into speakers.

The overall brightness is effectively controlled through those 3 potentiometers; I can't see an easy way to add in another potentiometer to control the overall brightness. If you figure out a way to do that, please let me know!

Is it possible you have used a logarithmic potentiometer and not a linear one? The LEDs should be completely off at the minimum potentiometer position.

Hi there,Can you please check that you have included the diodes D1 and D2 between the switch and the individual circuits. Also, the potentiometer middle pin goes to pin 3 on the 555 timer. It doesn't matter how you connect the left and right pins of the potentiometer, just as long as you have the centre pin going to pin 3 on the 555. Please let me know if you have any further issues and I will try to help.

Hi there, I've compared the two datasheets and nothing is jumping out at me which indicates you can't use the TIP120 instead of the TIP31. Please let me know if you try it out and it works the same, they seem very similar.

I've looked into this a bit and can't find any real explanation, this seems to just be a standard way to connect the potentiometer to the 555 timer. It appears in many circuits on the internet e.g. http://www.555-timer-circuits.com/led-dimmer.html

As far as I know, you should be fine to use a newer version of Teensy, but I haven't looked into it much. One thing to note is the Teensy's actually have pull up resistors on the pins, so you could just use those instead of having to solder a whole heap to a board like I did!

Hi, thanks for your comment, I'm looking forward to seeing your end product! The 555 timers put out a PWM signal which drives the transistor here. So for your LED strip, the white wire is connected to +12V and the other wires corresponding to each of the R G B colours are connected to the collector of each of the TIP31C transistors. Basically, the PWM is triggering the transistor here and the LED strip for each colour is grounded at the frequency of the PWM signal. Hope that clears things up! Best of luck with your project :)

Absolutely! The teensy is simply a substitute for the pre built board. You will find many other people's projects who use the IPAC boards to achieve the same functionality

Hi, thanks for your comment!I've checked out your Color Changing Wooden Lamp and it's really neat, I just added a comment there FYI :)If you do a bit of background research on LED strip controllers, pretty much all of them use PWM to control the brightness/colour mixing of the LEDs. Sure, you can do this with potentiometers too, but using PWM is much more efficient, since when you use a potentiometer, it's just a resistor and the excess power that the LEDs aren't using is dissipated as heat. If you're using long LED strips, you'll need more power, and thus you need to make sure that the potentiometer you use is rated for whatever power needs you have (consider that higher power requirement = larger component size = higher cost!!). If you don't design this correctly with the right compon...

Hi, thanks for your comment!I've checked out your Color Changing Wooden Lamp and it's really neat, I just added a comment there FYI :)If you do a bit of background research on LED strip controllers, pretty much all of them use PWM to control the brightness/colour mixing of the LEDs. Sure, you can do this with potentiometers too, but using PWM is much more efficient, since when you use a potentiometer, it's just a resistor and the excess power that the LEDs aren't using is dissipated as heat. If you're using long LED strips, you'll need more power, and thus you need to make sure that the potentiometer you use is rated for whatever power needs you have (consider that higher power requirement = larger component size = higher cost!!). If you don't design this correctly with the right components, you risk blowing out your potentiometer. Do your potentiometers in your lamp get really hot? Perhaps not, since your LED strips are quite short, but this is something to consider in your design. Also, with PWM you can more precisely control the dimming. You may have noticed with the lamp you made that controlling the brightness with the potentiometer was a bit touchy, in that it could go from really really dim to really really bright with just a small nudge of the potentiometer (this guy shows it in his video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmWOdjyQGNM). This is to do with the human eye having a logarithmic response to brightness. You probably need to turn the potentiometer to about 50% before your eyes can sense a considerable change in the brightness which means that you're effectively wasting about 50% of the potentiometers range. I guess you could get around this by using a logarithmic potentiometer but I haven't seen that done before so I'm not sure how it would work in practice. There's loads more information about this out on the net, so if you're interested in reading a bit more about this I recommend some further google searching!

Great Instructable and very cool end product!I believe that the 50 ohm resistor won't do much though (as you mentioned) since the LED strips have resistors on the strip for current limiting. Chances are that they have a higher resistance than 50 ohms, so your additional resistor in series with this won't have a great effect. If you were to do this project with a few single LEDs (R, G, B) you would want to include a current limiting resistor (R1) like you have with the 50 ohm resistor, otherwise you would most likely blow the LED when you wind your potentiometer (R2) down to 0 ohms.

This Instructable is for two inputs and one output so you should be able to just follow the steps here. Unless you are talking about having a single throw instead of a double for the switch?