Borillion's DIY LED Retrofit and esp2866 controller

[borillion]

So I was going to post what I did for my BioCube build in hopes that someone else can use the info. I don't know if some of the parts like the heatsink are available anymore because I bought them a while back and sat on them until I moved last November as I was quite happy to buy and replace the compact fluorescent tubes until about last April - May 2020 where suddenly I couldn't find anymore in the wattage needed. I thought I would buy one of the new hoods with LED's already build in but every site I checked was sold out of stock on these too. Maybe it was due to Covid-19 manufacturing restrictions or just age, I am not sure which but it was time to find my parts from 2016 and pull them out of the boxes my fish need light!

So these are 3W LEDs, I have 3 channels. I don't remember exactly how many of each I used but this is what I have written down in my notes.

It was something very close to this but 1 or 2 led's different, I had originally wanted to put UV led's in this array but opted out of it.

Channel 1
.............................................................................
2 Philips Luxeon ES Cyan 3v 700
2 Philips Luxeon ES True Cool Blue 3v 700
4 Philips Luxeon ES ROYAL BLUE 3v 700

Channel 2
.............................................................................

5 Philips Luxeon ES Neutral White 3v 1000mA
2 Philips Luxeon ES Lime 3v 1000
1 Philips Luxeon ES Warm White 2.5v(?) 1000 (suspect voltage)

ATI Channel 3
.............................................................................
8 Philips Luxeon ES ROYAL BLUE 3v 700

So for the light controller I got one of these boards and the meanwell LED drivers that plug into it. This came from Rapid LED.

They can be dimmed by using a PWM signal, the module furthest to the right is to power the two fans in the cover.

I used 24 AWG cable pulled from the ethernet cord as you can see here. Its supposed to be good for 7A, there is some discoloring on the white because I couldn't find my heat gun and used a lighter to shrink the labels on there lol.

As for the cooling on the heatsink I used the fan that came with it and two PWM controllable ones. Noctua NF-A6x25

Started with the bare Heat sink, and started the screws to make sure they fit.

​

First thing I did was solder up two cheap Chinese no-name LED's that I had from another project and test them out.
My very messy soldering skills checked out! It had been a couple years since I last soldered anything.

It was messy but got the job done, first I planned out how the strings would be arrange, drew them out with sharpie and was really hard on my self to get the most even spread, but I kinda let myself relax a bit and go with it. (Pardon my chaotic work style , not sure why I had some of that stuff on the table looking back )

Yes, they light up. Talk about blowing my retinas out, these have way more output that I expected.

Uncovered for a pic, but as I worked, testing each string I covered them with notebook paper to try and save my eyes. All working.

For the drivers to dim the LED's there are little jumpers you have to set for PWM mode, after setting those I could start to wire up my nodemcu dev board.
Here I am testing PWM with a single led I believe, more for a size comparison of the boards.

I followed a tutorial similar to this one. https://randomnerdtutorials.com/esp8266-nodemcu-web-server-slider-pwm/
This gave me a test gui that I can load in my browser, as well as be able to use a cron job from a linux machine or Tasker on android to send a command to the microserver running on it in the form of a web url with pwm parameters, as well as use the siders in a more manual fashion from my phone.

I have different channels to control different parts
http://10.1.0.122/setPWM?PWM1_val=0&PWM2_val=2&PWM3_val=2&PWM4_val=512

PWM1_val - sets white PWM
PWM2_val - sets warm white and lime
PWM3_val - Royal Blue LED
PWM4_val - Noctua Cooling Fan LED for heatsink airflow

I had meant to have this as a temporary testing setup and started designing and printing a proper enclosure in Fusion 360 but after partial printing and finding a mistake on the mounting hole spacing I stopped and its been a bit since I revisited. The LED driver board inside the Tupperware container, I cut the side out of pretty much to allow for air flow. The board next to the nodemcu board is power supply that outputs 5v to power the board, The servo cable, red, black and yellow provide power and the PWM signal to the phone.

The enclosure design in process.

Testing Joint samples, and test base panel, this is in white PETG.

I am glad to share my basic code, I need to get it uploaded to github and will come back with a comment linking to it soon!

If there is and feedback or questions, don't hesitate to comment.

 

[stefanm]

Nice! Why not add a PCA 9685 for 12 bit dimming.

Here's a similar project https://github.com/bbasil2012/SSLAC16
If you haven't already, it's worth a look.

 

[TDEcoral]

Cool project! I did something similar using a custom six channel driver PCB with ESP8266 and this project:

GitHub - NineteenFire/ESP-Blynk-LED-Controller: Uses Blynk and an ESP to control LED lights

Uses Blynk and an ESP to control LED lights. Contribute to NineteenFire/ESP-Blynk-LED-Controller development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

It took some work putting it all together and getting the code to run correctly, but I'm happy with how it all turned out. Are you putting the power supply into an enclosure of some kind? I found a plastic project box on digikey that was dimensionally close to the LRS-350-48 and mounted it inside then cut out the areas over the fan and exhaust.

 

[stefanm]

Cool project! I did something similar using a custom six channel driver PCB with ESP8266 and this project:

GitHub - NineteenFire/ESP-Blynk-LED-Controller: Uses Blynk and an ESP to control LED lights

Uses Blynk and an ESP to control LED lights. Contribute to NineteenFire/ESP-Blynk-LED-Controller development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

It took some work putting it all together and getting the code to run correctly, but I'm happy with how it all turned out. Are you putting the power supply into an enclosure of some kind? I found a plastic project box on digikey that was dimensionally close to the LRS-350-48 and mounted it inside then cut out the areas over the fan and exhaust.

This is probably my favourite project and has inspired me to design/build my own drivers, still a lot of work to do, I'll probably integrate into a reef-pi with a modified PCA 9685 bonnet. Right now I'm trying to make the drivers as small as possible, I'll be using fixed current on all channels some will be at 350ma and most at 550ma~600ma or so max, I also have on my current lights those luxeon k16's.

 

[borillion]

LOL cool. I hadn't thought of that honestly. I figured having pwm with 1024 different steps and for only 3 led channels was more than enough.

I do have one or two for other non-reef related robotics (droid) projects. I will go check those other git projects out for sure.

Nice! Why not add a PCA 9685 for 12 bit dimming.

Here's a similar project https://github.com/bbasil2012/SSLAC16
If you haven't already, it's worth a look.

 

[borillion]

I was in the process of printing that enclosure I was designing to put it all into and the mount to the underside of the stand ( really a table) I was using. I haven't spent the time to finish it because it wasn't really urgent.

Cool project! I did something similar using a custom six channel driver PCB with ESP8266 and this project:

GitHub - NineteenFire/ESP-Blynk-LED-Controller: Uses Blynk and an ESP to control LED lights

Uses Blynk and an ESP to control LED lights. Contribute to NineteenFire/ESP-Blynk-LED-Controller development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

It took some work putting it all together and getting the code to run correctly, but I'm happy with how it all turned out. Are you putting the power supply into an enclosure of some kind? I found a plastic project box on digikey that was dimensionally close to the LRS-350-48 and mounted it inside then cut out the areas over the fan and exhaust.

 

[borillion]

Added code here. https://github.com/Borillion/wifi_led_controller