My Lights

About

Using the LED controller boards that I designed, I am in the process of building different lights for my room. For the moment, I just have two, but I'll be building more in the future. Following is a description of how I converted some lights I bought at the hardware store.

Wall Sconces

I bought a set of wall sconces from Lowe's with the intention of converting them for my lights. I didn't have much time left in the summer, so I decided to grab some commercial lights and then modify them to fit my controller. They weren't cheap ($40 each), but they had a lot of potential. Essentially, I planned to put 3 LEDs vertically on the light so that I could blend 3 different colors along the glass.

Converting them was really easy. Here's what I did.

Installing the Board

The first step was to find a good spot for the board. After removing the original lightbulb assembly, I found that it fit perfectly in the main chassis.

After fitting it, I drilled some holes and tested it out.

Holes matching board

Testing the fit

Then, I used 16 gauge stranded wire and wired up all of the board outputs to the LEDs so that the wires would wrap around an LED mount I was designing. After soldering all of them up, I installed the board using nylon spacers as standoffs.

Starting to solder all 12 wires (4 LED+, then 4 each for green, red, and blue)

Installed board

Mounting the LEDs

I wanted to use 3 LEDs to get as much coverage of the light as possible. Furthermore, I wanted to angle the outer LEDs outward. My dad suggested mounting the LEDs on a piece of formed sheet metal and helped me cut out some patterns and bend them.