Suggestions for BigBox LED lighting

Discussion in 'BigBox General Chat' started by JohnEsc, Sep 23, 2015.

  1. JohnEsc

    JohnEsc Well-Known Member

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    A number of people have reported that the 1st upgrade they will make will be to add LED lighting to their BigBox. I've seen a number of options on Amazon.com and @ IKEA. What LED lighting would you recommend? Would appreciate a link to your LED suggestion. Thanks in advance!
     
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  2. thingster

    thingster Active Member

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    Buy a cheap LED strip on eBay and stick it on the side panels of the printer. Please keep in mind it has to be 24V since BigBox's PSU is 24V.
     
  3. Stian Indal Haugseth

    Stian Indal Haugseth Well-Known Member

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    If you want it for better video for the cam go for daylight LEDs. Around 6k kelvin. And you can use 12V. Just wire two strips in series.
     
  4. Pierce

    Pierce Well-Known Member

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    I was looking to just wire up some cheap and cheerful strip to the GPIO pins on the raspberry pi as I think it has a 5V supply, obviously only helpful if you are getting yours with a raspberry pi, but at least thats a possible option as well.
     
  5. Henry feldman

    Henry feldman Well-Known Member

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    The GPIO can't power a lot of LEDs. You can certainly trigger the LEDs with that using a LED driver like the sparkfun boards, but most strips burn major fractions of an amp or more...
     
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  6. Pierce

    Pierce Well-Known Member

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    Ummm, how many is alot do you reckon? I was thinking I only really need maybe 5-10 on each side at the front to give a bit of extra power, I don't need anything crazy. Thanks for the pointers I'll be doing some more research/testing. But yes was also thinking of having multi colour and seeing if the raspberry pi could control it at all
     
  7. Dr Jeep

    Dr Jeep Well-Known Member

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    Mine will live in a man shed so I am thinking I might fit IR LED's and remove any IR filter from the camera (if installed) so I can check at night without lighting the place up like its Christmas.

    Not sure if special attention is going to be required to not upset the bed levelling. But then I guess it works in daylight which contains some IR so maybe not a problem ?

    Pierce, Use a simple transistor drive for the gpio on the pi, they aren't up to driving LED's directly ( aren't they 3.3v on the pi anyway ?)
     
  8. Pierce

    Pierce Well-Known Member

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    I checked and raspberry pi 2 has 3.3v and 5v. The older pi's were just 3.3v, I feel a weekend project coming up to play and test this all out :)

    Also seriously jealous of you having a man shed...
     
  9. Henry feldman

    Henry feldman Well-Known Member

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    So looking at an example strip (just white, not dotstar or neopixel) on the Adafruit site the strip draws Max 1.2 Amps/meter at 12V. According to the RPI site: "The GPIO pins can draw 50mA safely, distributed across all the pins; an individual GPIO pin can only safely draw 16mA."

    What I do is use this: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11850 and then you can use the PWM/on-off pin to drive it from the PI.

    Might want to watch this (shows how the above works and power management): https://www.sparkfun.com/news/1722
     
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  10. paultnl

    paultnl Member

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  11. Henry feldman

    Henry feldman Well-Known Member

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  12. paultnl

    paultnl Member

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    No just hooked it directly to a spare rail on my 12V power supply. As I mentioned I only used one so it is 6W.
     

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