site banner
ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  1d ago (text post)   369 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for April 22, 2025

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

1
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

NeoPixels (WS28xx), DotStar (APA102/SK6812/SK9822), and most circuit-on-board designs do their own current control for each (zone of) LED -- the only real challenges for implementation are making sure you don't have too much voltage drop (because current control can't adjust for input voltage below the forward voltage drop), and if so just running additional power connections to the middle of the strip. They're not great for room lighting because of the color quality, though, even the RGBW variants, and diffusers only help so much. They're designed for constant voltage drivers; using a constant current power supply can cause problems ranging from comm issues to drastically reduced lifespan.

Cheap RGB lighting strips will almost universally do the series+resistor thing, as will even some decent single-color room lighting. Constant-current drivers and LED strips built for them exist, but you're usually stuck with very specific lengths of LED strip as a result; unless you really need the extra brightness uniformity, I dunno that I can really recommend any.

If you're trying to work with battery voltage to a non-current-controlled output, I really recommend a buck-boost-buck voltage stabilizer. You can get 12v ones for small or mid-sized applications that will handle the full voltage range you want to run a lead-acid battery down to, and are good on output within about 5%. Only downside is that they don't like starting in <-10F cold temperatures.

I got a cheap 10A (<5A realistically) one of those, 24->12. I don't have any way to test ripple, but at least it'll be easy to see if it makes LEDs flicker. Some of the chineseium power electronics is amazing, some of it's absolutely terrifying.

It's weird that for all the problems AC LED lighting has, DC is somehow no better lol. Seems like that's true of a lot of stuff that you'd think direct DC would be good for.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats