light

Sorry, I couldn’t find a better blog post title :-( This blog post is actually something like a mix of my two previous blog posts. I’ve enhanced the previous RGB Led Strip project controlled by an Arduino in order to send temperature readings via XBee to another XBee node. The reason why I want to do this is that I want to control some RGB Led Strips in my home with various intelligent modes (like the example one based on temperature). But as I need some sensors for this intelligence, I thought this was an interesting opportunity for building some Home Automation right there and gather sensors data from those lighting nodes to a gateway one which would keep all the data in a central place and provide a way to interact with all the various nodes. »

I bought a few weeks ago some quite cheap 5 meters RGB LED strips (60 LEDs per meter) on eBay. My intent is to drive them with a custom Arduino receiving commands over some XBees. I was in need of MOSFETs in order to drive the 3 RGB channels, and again found some cheap ones on eBay I received a few days ago. Today was a good opportunity for doing some basic tests. My first step was to control the color of the RGB LED Strip with the help of the MOSFETs and an Arduino. Before your read the rest of this blog post, you should read Adafruit tutorial on RGB LED Strips and Bildr tutorial on MOSFETs. I mostly did what Adafruit tutorial explains, except I added 10kΩ resistors, between each control/gate pins and ground (so 3 resistors for a RGB strip), in order to force the signal to LOW until the Arduino kicks in! »