Tag Archives: LED

Lamp replaced by “DIY Ambilight”

  By Robert Hekkers | September 19, 2010 - 19:15 | Domotica
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LED strips

Even in full daylight and the LED strips @ 50%, this already looks VERY OK to me! Can’t wait till it’s dark outside..

After some small tests during the last couple of weeks, it was time to finish replacing a lamp near the TV with LED lighting. It’s still a big cable mess in the corner where the TV is located, but you can’t start cleaning up when you’re not finished, right? A lamp, holding 2 energy saving light bulbs, consuming 11W, has now been replaced by LED strips attached to the back of the TV. I call it my “DIY ambilight” project :-)

The following components were used:

  • 1 x JeeNode v4;
  • 2 x MOSFET Plug;
  • 3 meters of warm white LED strip;
  • XBee series 2 module;
  • XBee breakout board;
  • 3.5 mm mono plugs;
  • 12V power supply.

And 3 x software; 1 for my Home Automation system, 1 for the JeeNode and 1 for the Touchscreen. The Pronto will follow soon.

From my Home Automation system i can control each of the 4 segments individually; i created a new device type and when i send a “L=30” command to this device, the LED strip on the left of the TV goes to 30%. When i send a “B=0“, the bottom LED strip goes to 0%. A “*=10” will result in all 4 LED strips to go to 10%.

The hardware (power supply, JeeNode, LED strips) is controlled by a PLCBUS appliance module, so when it’s time to go to bed, i don’t have to worry about additional standby power usage.

On the Touchscreen i added a popup form so i can change the settings of the LED strips:

TV LED control

Although I’m technically able to, i didn’t put 4 trackbar controls on this form to control each LED segment individually. The reason for that is that I don’t think it will ever be used by anyone else but myself. I think, in daily practice, these 4 LED strips will only be switched on and off, once a brightness level has been set that suits the ligthing in the rest of the living room.

The sketch that is running on the JeeNode is pretty straight forward, once you’ve seen Jean Claude Wipplers sketch to control RGB strips. I think it’s needless to say that without his hardware, software and sharing of knowledge, i would probably still be watching blinking LEDs… well, sort of :-)

Well, anyway, here it is.

Curious about how the back side of the TV looks right now? Here you can see where the LED strips are attached to the back side of the TV and where i placed the 12V adapter and the enclosure that holds the MOSFET plugs, JeeNode and XBee.

Once i had it all (more or less) figured out, it took me 2 afternoons to go from a cardboard test setup to what it is now. Based on the response from wife and children, this is the best thing that has happened since the introduction of the touchscreen. Which I implemented 18 months ago… :-? And what has happened to that $$$ Roomba???

Update:

Power consumption? The LED strips provide enough light @ 16%, resulting in a total of 2W power usage. Not bad!

Movee

  By Robert Hekkers | September 17, 2010 - 23:01 | Domotica
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Making a video takes too much time; I do have a DV cam, but in my opinion it takes to long to rewind, connect the firewire cable, transfer the clip to the PC etc. etc. My Nikon D90 also has video capabilities, but I’ve used it maybe once or twice in the beginning. The D90 can shoot 1280×720@24 fps MJPEG movies. I used it a couple of times again while we were on holiday and the results were quite good; although i still prefer my DV cam: focusing is slow and a bit difficult with the D90.

Here’s a small clip of my test with a JeeNode and 4 LED strip remainders i still had from my kitchen LED adventure.

JeeNode+12V = Oops!!!

  By Robert Hekkers | September 14, 2010 - 22:56 | Domotica
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Last weekend i was working on one of those things where i started collecting components a long time ago but that still wasn’t finished. Time to finally use these 4 meters of LED strip!

Warm white LED strip

With this warm white LED strip i want to create my own lighting in the corner where our TV is mounted to the wall. The strips will be put on the back side of the TV, shining on the (white) wall. I’m not really into RGB strips; it’s nice to see (for a while), but it’s to colorful for my taste.

I’m going to use a JeeNode with 2 MOSFET plugs to control the 4 segments:

JeeNode and MOSFET plugs

All wirelessly controllable by the use of an XBee module of course; a new page on my Pronto TSU 9600 with a couple of sliders (like on the picture below) to control these 4 segments individually will do the rest:

Pronto sliders

But while i was trying to create some sort of experimental setup with 4 small pieces of LED strip on a piece of cardboard, something went  terribly wrong; somehow the wires of the 12V LED adapter made contact with something that couldn’t handle this amount of power: Poofff !! One voltage regulator blown to pieces. I don’t know how this could go wrong, cause I didn’t do this, it just happened!

VR fried

Well, this JeeNode doesn’t work anymore…

OK. Fortunately I had another unused JeeNode laying around so i could finish the test (it works brilliantly), but what to do with this JeeNode? Replace the VR (the only component with visual damage) or discard the whole JeeNode cause there will probably be more components that suffered from this? I don’t know; I’m the type of guy that didn’t even know what a pull-up resistor was a year ago, so I’ve got no clue :-(

First I’ll finish this TV LED project and when I’m almost running out of JeeNodes in the future, I’ll give this damaged one a try…

LED strip integrated in Domotica system

  By Robert Hekkers | April 4, 2010 - 22:03 | Domotica
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Now that the new floor is nearly finished, i can start working on some Home Automation related subjects again; the first was using LED strips in the kitchen.

LED strips

LED strips

In total 4 segments of LED strip are used; 2 near the floor at the plinths of the lower kitchen cabinets, 1 at the counter top and 1 on top of the upper kitchen cabinets.

Today i finished controlling all these LED strips individually.

I don’t have Ethernet in the kitchen, so i used the ZigBee approach (again :-) ). I mounted a XBee on a Sparkfun XBee RS232 board and connected it to the Chromoflex RS232 RX input:

XBee and Chromoflex in a box

XBee and Chromoflex in a box

The XBee RS232 board is powered by the adapter that also powers the Chromoflex, so all i needed was a wall outlet for the Chromoflex adapter and the Chromoflex was “connected”.

Now it was time to add control functions to my Touchscreen application, running on my Asus TOP in the livingroom. I added a “LED” button on the floorplan, in the middle of the kitchen:

LED button on the floorplan

LED button on the floorplan

And i found a very cool Trackbar Control and created a new pop-up form with it, that appears when you push the “LED” button:

LED Trackbar

LED Trackbar

With this form i can control each LED segment individually. To minimize traffic, i used the same approach as i did earlier with controlling my thermostat; a timer event fires when the Trackbar value hasn’t changed for 1.5 seconds and sends the new value to my Domotica System by XMLRPC:

VB.Net code

That’s all there is to it. My Domotica system takes care of the rest e.g. building the Chromoflex packet based on the USP3 protocol, wrapping it in a XBee Transmit Request packet and sending it to the ZigBee coordinator. Home Automation is sooo cool :-)

Wireless LED strip control

  By Robert Hekkers | April 1, 2010 - 22:58 | Domotica
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Well, this post could just as well be called Wireless Chromoflex controller, or Zigbee LED Strip controller, or … :-)

What i’m actually trying to accomplish is placing 14 meters of LED strip, split into 5 separately controllable parts in my house, without the need of additional wiring (i hate that!).  Just plug it into the mains and start using it… that’s the goal.

Yesterday the last goods i was waiting for arrived, so tonight it was time to make some sort of ‘proof of concept’; would i be able to control a Chromoflex by using Zigbee as transport medium instead of wires? Of course! Why wouldn’t it? But it’s always nice to actually see it working with your own eyes; and tonight i did.

Wireless Chromoflex

Wireless Chromoflex

In terms of programming, enabling my Home Automation system to be able to control an interface like the Chromoflex by using Zigbee, needed some additional coding. Normally an interface is addressed directly over TCP/IP or RS232, but this time i could not transmit the Chromoflex packet directly; it had to be encapsulated in a Zigbee Transmit Request frame. A feature that will be very useful in the future i guess.

To be continued…

Predictable LED troubles

  By Robert Hekkers | January 31, 2010 - 22:40 | Domotica
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In november 2008 i replaced 2 conventional fluorescent tubes by a LED version. Thinking they would last a long, long time was very, very wrong… In october 2009, not even a year after i started using them, the first tube started acting strange; one of the three rows of a total of 342 LEDs wasn’t burning anymore. Next day, the second row of 114 LED’s stopped burning. Guess what happened the day after that… a rough calculation tells me this tube has done its job for 360 x 5 = 1800 hours. Multiplying by 10 doesn’t even come close to what is advertised!

So i called the supplier for replacement tubes.

LED tube

LED tube, "version 2"

He promised me he would send me 2 new tubes, although he warned me in advance that it could take some time.. OK, i wasn’t in a hurry for replacement cause one tube was still working. But in the 2nd week of January i called again  to ask why it took so long for my LED tubes to arrive? The result was a very interesting conversation and i was given a bit of insight on how the LED market is working nowadays.

For example, i was told that the supplier had experienced a huge amount of failing LED light products being returned, especially during the hot summer of 2009. Bad design led to massive overheating of LED tubes and other LED products, causing lots and lots of  malfunctions..

Another thing the supplier told me, is that they had stopped selling most of the brands and had now limited their product range to only the high end segment; only those (with an equally high price tag) products could possibly live up to the life expectations that are so strongly advertised. Between the lines, you could read that his business had been seriously threatened by all the problems they faced with LED products in 2009. Quite a story for a normal ‘consumer’ like me who likes to try out new products, technologies and gather experiences with those products.

In my opinion, LED is hugely overrated in specifications, lifetime expectation and savings. I’ve bought at least 10 LED bulbs in the past year of which 3 stopped working in their first days. That’s 25-30%! within a week.  Needless to say i have very big doubts about the quality of the current LED technology.

And what will happen when my newly placed LED tubes stop working again in, say, 6 years? Will those tubes be replaced again, at no charge? Guess not.

No, for me LED is a nice product for the manufacturers, who don’t fully control the process of producing a good LED product yet but don’t mind making big money with it already, letting the customers pay 80 Euro for a single LED tube and delivering garbage.

And for politicians, who are encouraging the use of LED to show off how ‘green’ they are, while believing the LED producers on their blue eyes regarding to the quality of LED products. I wonder how much of them are actually using LED products themselves.

Me? I’ve learned my lesson and will not buy any LED product until my box of spare energy saving lamps is completely empty.

Replacing Fluorescent (TL) tubes with LED version

  By Robert Hekkers | November 6, 2008 - 12:31 | Domotica
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While doing all kinds of things to reduce power usage in our house (very good to combine with Domotica), i realised it was time to do something about those fluorescent tubes in my office.
There are 2 lighting fittings above my head, each one of them having 2 (120 cm) fluorescent light tubes of 36W. That’s quite a lot of light, but also Watt.
First thing i did was reduce the amount of tubes to 2. This still gave me enough light; but still i wasn’t satisfied and was looking for a way to reduce power usage further.
So i started looking for a way to replace these TL tubes with a LED version. After searching some websites that have lots of information about LED lights (like www.olino.org), i found these tubes.

Power consumption of these tubes is 15W, and they can operate without a ballast. If you’ve ever felt how hot a ballast can become, you’ll understand what waste of energy this is.

I decided to buy 2 of these tubes and yesterday they arrived:

Because i have to modify the fittings a bit (removing the ballast and rearrange the wiring inside), i have to wait untill next weekend before i can start replacing the tubes with their LED version since that’s the first time i’ll be home during daytime…

I hope that replacing the TL tubes with LED tubes will also reduce the noise i am experiencing from the TL tubes. That would be a nice advantage; this will save me a few X10 noise filters. And i’ll get rid of the sometimes very annoying time the TL tubes need to start giving light.

We’ll see what happens.