What is it about?
Our VAN PI Dimmy Board is used to control LEDs as ambient lighting in the camper. In addition to normal LEDs, RGB LEDs can also be connected to add some color to the atmosphere. You can find out exactly how to do this here.
What do you need?
- RGB LEDs or RGB strips (ground switched - 4 pins - 12V Red Green Blue)
- Pekaways Dimmy with flashed Wemos D1
Can anything go wrong?
Don't forget to protect everything. The dimmy board should be protected with a maximum of 30A and the outgoing channels with a maximum of 5A/15A. But more on that later. The important thing at this point is that you don't forget the fuses and pay attention to the correct pin assignments.
Commissioning Dimmy
Preparing Dimmy
Many of you are already using the Dimmy as a normal LED dimmer in our system and have installed everything according to the Quickstart Guide. So take another look at the Quickstarts. Basically, there are only two steps to follow: 1. Solder the Wemos D1 onto the Dimmyboard (pluggable or fixed) and 2. Flash the Wemos D1 with our firmware PekawayMOTA. This can be done with our Online Flasher (Chrome) or the onboard flasher from VANPI.
Connecting normal LEDs
Here you can see the connection plan for the dimmy. The input voltage is present on the plus side the whole time and the LEDs are only dimmed via the minus pole. This is why we can easily switch the lamps on with a switch connected to ground. For anyone who wants to know how the LEDs are dimmed, please watch a few videos on PWM on YouTube. In short: we switch them on and off very quickly.
Connecting RGB LEDs
12V and three colors to ground
Most RGB LEDs are controlled via the ground line. This means that there is a positive phase on which the 12V is located and the brightness of the respective colors red, green and blue is controlled via the three ground lines.
So, as shown in the picture, we use the 12V from one channel. We could use 5A for LEDs there, which corresponds to around 50W. So it's already a very long LED strip. For the ground line of the individual colors, we now only use the ground line from three channels. In the web interface, we can name these three channels according to the colors and can now use the controls to set the color we want.
For people who have more experience with Node-Red (our backend) it is of course also possible to integrate a ColorPicker. https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-contrib-ui-iro-color-picker
Short video about it on Youtube:
The LEDs in operation:
