[Tom] has been refining a board that drives a high power RGB LED for applications like this moodlight. It’s based around an ATmega8 microcontroller. The goal was to make an RGB LED easy to work with: It can cycle between colors in standalone mode. You can control it via a serial interface. It also has a pin header to hooking up three potentiometers for manual color mixing. Boards aren’t available yet, but he’s already posted a build tutorial. The board looks straightforward enough that it shouldn’t be too hard to layout if you really want to.
6 thoughts on “Tom’s RGB Mood Lamp”
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ATmega8 a bit overpowered for controlling 3 LEDs. It’s a cool hack, maybe I’ll build one using the smallest mcu I can (and use SMT…IMO there’s no point to using PDIP if you’re gonna go to the trouble of making your own PCB)
I’m currently building something similar, but I use attinys. I simply use 3 Mosfets and 3 Resistors to limit the current (and waste some power…).
I’m very interested how he has done that with a current limiting IC (lm317) and 3 small transistors, but i cant find the schematics :(
wow, how did you guys hear about it. This whole project got started from a discussion on a forum thread (http://shop.rabtron.co.za/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=49). Atmega8 is a bit of a overkill but thats the only avr’s I had at the time plus the extra pins allowed me to have a analog input for controlling the lights and uart connection for control from a pc.
btw – a local electronics supplier here in South Africa started to sell them as a kit my my homemade pcb’s: http://shop.rabtron.co.za/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=3091
maxthereal: schematics will be on the site soon. Just need to clean it up a bit
do you have the LED connected to PWM lines for color mixing?
how does this lamp sense one’s mood? isn’t that the whole point of a mood lamp? to sense one’s mood and depending on the mood its sensing it changes the colour? eg if you’re happy it turns yellow..