LED panel above my monitor!

The title of this post may make you think I'm going to install a white keylight above my monitor, something basically every streamer with a camera has. And while I could actually use one of those, limiting myself to a single color, or a tunable white is just too boring. Plus, I happen to have some spare unused LED matrices which are just begging me to be used in a project.

What I used

Other than the usual soldering iron, copious amounts of flux, solder and praying to God my solder joints survive another day, I used 2 16x16 WS2812B LED panels, with an extra 16x14 (I'll explain why later) WS2812B panel, creating a 16x46 LED panel.

Why the 16x14 panel? When I was removing hot glue from that panel (failed project), I accidentally tugged a little too hard and ripped the PCB in a way where I only had 14 functioning rows. Oh well, no biggie.

For the controller, I chose the ESP32-C3 Supermini. I know that by now, I should already have lots of my own tiny controllers for setups like this, but nothing beats the simplicity of 3 wires soldered to the board.

As for the level shifter? None. While this is an absolute sin, there is simply not enough room behind the matrices for me to stuff a level shifter in there. I used GPIO2, which has a pull up resistor. This run works just fine without a level shifter, so I didn't feel the need to include one.

Wiring

In my opinion, this is probably the best wiring I've ever done. The total amount of wagos I used is 1. And even that one is just to hold the fuse on the PSU side. Every other connection is made purely with solder and secured with electrical tape.

Instead of having a long wires run to a large wago which would then go to the power supply, I made a single line which has exposed bits in the middle where power injection wires can be connected. The current running through these wires is not significant enough to cause a large voltage drop, if any drop at all.

Power supply wise, I think I did as well as one can do. This PSU is rated for 5V 15A, just barely enough to run this panel without any issues. If you punch the numbers mentioned here into the WLED calculator, you might find that it reports 18A at 50% brightness with RGB white. However, this kind of situation (all LEDs at white) will never happen.

Fixing it to the wall

As of now, the panel is fully constructed and the only thing I have to do now (ignoring software setup) is to punch it on a wall. I had many ideas, including super glue, hot glue (never again) and double sided tape.

I immediately threw away the idea of hot glue, as it's the sole reason behind one of the panels lacking 32 pixels (plus it wouldn't really hold well)

Super glue? Ehhh... In the case that I have to fix it, I'd like to be able to take it off without ripping my wall apart.

So double sided tape it is. One slight issue however. The only double sided tape I have isn't really made for walls. Oh well, no biggie. I just stuck as much of it as I can on the back of the panel.

You might wonder, will this still be on the wall 1 week later? LOL. 1 week is already a rad amount of time for it to hold properly. I imagine I'll have to spend at least 5 minutes every day pushing it in every spot for it to stay up.

Software troubles

Any time I want to use RGB LEDs, WLED is the way to go. After a quick install of the latest version (no usermods), I added my panel and changed the current limit. Almost immediately I was blinded for 30 seconds. These damn LEDs are just so stupidly bright. And that's what I love about them.

Well anyway, I thought I was done, until I tried the scrolling text effect, and noticed the panel was upside down.

No big deal, just had to change the 1st LED to the bottom one on every panel. Great, now it's working, right? I wish it would. Now the panel was mirrored!

Okay cool. Just change the 1st LED from left to right. If only that would work. Now my panel was messed up in all sorts of weird ways. I reverted that, and looked into the segment settings. There I found a Reverse checkbox, which solved the issue once and for all.

Is it actually that blinding?

^{Measured with my phone's light meter at a 1 meter distance in the center of the panel at full brightness.}

To be honest, I got a little dizzy when measuring the blue light.

That's about it for now. Just wait until I add a mic to this. ✌️