RGB LED Fan Controller (custom electronics project)

[CalcProgrammer1]

It's installed now!

I finished all the cables, connected everything, and taped the board to a place it would fit (the LED cord is shorter than I would have liked, but did not have much ribbon cable to work with, it was scraps of a wider ribbon that I took from the robotics lab).


The serial port uses the COM2 motherboard header:


The fan mounted inside the PC:


From the front:


Different solid colors:

 

[S0ULphIRE]

preeeeeettttyyyyyyyy nice work!

All that's left to improve is the circuit board. Maybe something that fits into one of the optical drive bays, with four knobs on the front for manually changing the colours on the fly. That'd be pretty sick imo

 

[CalcProgrammer1]

Eh, the point was to not have knobs, I wanted it to be controlled from the PC itself. If I do have knobs they would be digital ones that would feed data to the microcontroller (might actually be a cool idea, the knobs could also feed data into the PC through serial so while they could control the colors without PC intervention, the PC could pull data from them to use for anything that rotational input would be good for). Also I don't think I'll be redesigning the PCB, I put enough work into this project and it looks great, the inside I will clean up when I finalize the programming (worked on the fading system earlier tonight but it isn't complete yet), might be able to fit the PCB above the fan on the front of the case and run the wires behind the drive bays. If I have time I'll do some wire management on the PC (new case has sort of a window on the side, it's just a vent but it's big enough to see in).

When I do have some more programming time I'll finish the micro code (the fading is almost done and implemented on serial, the serial protocol is done, and RPM is close, all the code is finally organized and commented) and then clean up my basic GUI before doing fancy things (with the fading close to being finished, the color wheel app I want to make is that much closer, the PC will just pick "key colors" around the wheel, program them in, then let the micro take care of the fading, micro tells the PC that the fade is complete, PC loads it up with the next key colors, fades again, and it repeats in a loop to rotate the colors around.

 

[CalcProgrammer1]

I got RPM detection working as well as save states, save state stores the current configuration in the chip's EEPROM memory so that when the PC is shut down and the board loses power, it will restore it while the PC boots up. I also got crossfading working on the micro (the micro code is done except for a few bugs, but all the functionality is working and implemented). As for the PC app, I finally got serial port reads to work, so RPM display works and checking for save/load return messages works. I still need to add a routine that polls the board for each LED's current value as well as the fan's speed so that upon opening the GUI all the sliders are automatically set to their true values (and not zero, which is weird). I also will run this function when loading saved state, so that the values applied from the load are shown on the GUI. The other things I want to do to the GUI are add a crossfade setup mode, a COM port selector, and the ability to save different patterns to files and load them with a single click. It also needs some touch-up things like a custom icon, and if I could figure out how, it would be nice to drop to system tray with RPM tool-tip.

 

[Greg]

Featured on Hack a Day, nice job man!

Edit: You already knew that. lol

 

[CalcProgrammer1]

Yeah, I submitted it there since I read Hack a Day every day (they post a lot of interesting stuff!).