Custom LED Strip Controller

Last year, I put a Govee RGBIC LED Strip Light over our garage door for some Xmas cheer. It wasn't really suited to the job of being almost outside, so I was unsurprised when it stopped working in January. More on that one later.

This year, I bought an IP67 waterproof replacement, a BTF-LIGHTING WS2811 (12V). Since this is just a plain LED strip with no controller or power supply, I "needed" (wanted) to make my own.

After a few experiments on a breadboard, I found the excellent WLED project which is compatible with the ESP32 dev boards I have several of. After flashing the firmware and wiring up my dev board to a SN74AHCT125 level shifter, I was able to control the LED strip!

In order to get the 5V required by the ESP32 dev board, I bought some buck converters. Annoyingly, the ones I got have no mounting holes, making it rather difficult to avoid shorting out against the other board.

Circuit boards shown in project box

Since I'd 3D printed the box it was going in, I printed a second copy of the box lid, scaled down by 10mm so it would drop inside and separate the two boards, with enough room for the wires to get past.

Part-assembled project

I added some cable ties on the inside of the box for strain relief, screwed the lid down, and was ready to connect it up!

Completed and boxed project

I still need to figure out how I'm going to mount this on the ceiling of the garage, and wire it up properly (I've ordered some plugs, as well as 230V and 12V fuses), but surely that won't take me too long…

As for the broken Govee strip, after I took it down I found a few places where it was clearly damaged. One of the chips looked corroded from water damage, and one of the traces on the PCB was worn through. I tried bridging the broken trace, but after I soldered it and powered on, the chip let out the magic smoke. Thankfully, these sorts of LED strips can be cut to length, so I just removed the broken parts and mounted it on my shelves instead. It's now lighting up my various trinkets nicely.

Shelf trinkets in purple light

Custom LED Strip Controller
Mat Gadd