THE PROJECT

I wanted to have some sort of display that could illuminate my room in the evening. I loved the designs that I found online, but they were expensive. I decided to build one from scratch. I bought an Arduino, 8 feet of LED lights, a beefy power supply, a slew of miscellaneous electrical components and I was ready to go.

MY Role

An LED Matrix is essentially a stack of rows of small programmable lights. I bought the LEDs in spools of four meters and wired them together.

• I wrote a script to select the colors of each individual pixel and used this to create mesmerizing patterns. I used the Adafruit Neopixel library that contains a protocol which simplifies the communication between the Arduino and the lights.

• I calculated the power requirements for this project and I ended up with a solid 20A requirement to run the lights at full brightness. Needless to say, I currently run the matrix at 1/4 power.

• I built a display for the matrix LED. I placed a sheet of frosted acrylic in front of the matrix to diffuse the light because I was aiming for a softer glow.