It's small

I bought a really small 8x8 LED panel a while ago because I have a problem. I just can’t resist a nice WS2812 LED panel, much like I can’t resist an e-ink display. These days I manage to stay sober, but once in a while I’ll see a nice cheap LED panel and fall off the wagon. It has now been thirteen minutes that I have gone without buying LED panels, and this is my story.

My story

The LED panel in question, your honor.

This isn’t really going to be super interesting, but there are some good lessons, so I thought I’d write it up anyway. On the right you can see the LED panel I used, it’s a bare PCB with a bunch of WS2812 (Neopixel) addressable LEDs soldered onto it. It was the perfect excuse for trying out WLED, which I’ve wanted to take a look at for ages, and which turned out to be absolutely fantastic.

As with every light-based project, one of the big issues is proper diffusion. You don’t want your LEDs to show up as the points of light they are, we really like nice, big, diffuse lights, so you need a way to do that. My idea was to print a two-layer white square out of PLA (which would be translucent enough to show the light, but not so translucent that you could see the LEDs behind it. I also printed a box for the square to go in front of:

The three pieces.
I bet you're glad I included this complicated assembly photo, aren't you?

I printed the diffuser (the white square) first, held it over the LED panel and increased or decreased the distance of the square from the LEDs until the LEDs didn’t look like points, but the colors also didn’t blend into the neighboring squares’ colors. This turned out to be around 10mm, so that’s how thick I made the box.

The eagle-eyed among you may want to seek medical assistance, but if you have normal human eyes, you may have noticed that there’s nowhere in the box for the microcontroller to go, and you would be correct. For this build, I decided to use an ESP8266 (specifically, a WeMos dev board), but I didn’t want to make the whole box chunky just to fit a small microcontroller in there, so I did the next best thing:

I designed a hole in the back of the box for the cables that connect to the LED panel, and I glued the ESP8266 to the back of the box. YOLO.

Only God may judge me.

Look, it works great, ok? The cables are nice and shortish, even though they go to the entirely wrong side of the thing, the USB connector is at a very weird place, and the ESP8266 is exposed to the elements and the evil eye. It’s perfect.

Here’s the top side, with the diffuser:

The top side, with the diffuser.

And here’s the whole mini tiny cute little panel showing some patterns from WLED (did I mention it’s excellent? It is).

So cute.

Epilogue

That’s it! I learned a few things and made a cute box of lights. I encourage you to make your own, it’s extremely fun and mesmerizing and I love it and gave it to a friend because I never used it and it just took up space and then made a massive 32x32 version that I also never use and hung it on my wall.

Please feel free to Tweet or toot at me, or email me directly.