RGB Light CONTROLLER

I scored some of these analog RGB strips and needed a way to power them, and to be able to control the colours.

Initial prototyping showed that I needed about 20V to be useful, and I could easily switch each colour via a MOSFET driven from a microcontroller. First attempt was with an Arduino, then another with an ESP8266. At this point, I realised that you have to choose the MOSFET gate voltage to suit the logic, so common IRF540 devices won’t work with the 3.3 V available to ESP devices. I selected IRLB8271 instead, and this works.

I have tried a few different circuits, involving different coding.

  • Cycling through colours
  • Random colour cycle
  • Running a web server, using a web page to choose colours

Now to get from the breadboard to a finished circuit …

Useful links