Random Electrical Fiddling - Part 3

I made a new LED strip light for the kitchen.

First I grabbed one of the pieces of wood I've recovered from a recycled pallet and placed a centre mark. From this mark I marked off 2cm intervals. I cut 30 or so short strips of 3 LEDs from an LED ribbon purchased on eBay for a couple of quid. You can find such strips here http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_nkw=5050+300+LED+warm+white

I laid each of the small strips out on the piece of wood, removed the backing tape that covers the adhesive, and stuck them down using a fingernail to apply pressure around the edges.

Each strip of three LEDs has a positive and negative connection at each end of the strip. The intention was to connect all the positive contacts down one side to what would become the positive rail and all the negative contacts down the other side to what would become the negative rail. I therefore needed two power rails.


I added a strip of self adhesive copper tape along each edge of the wood. The copper strips were laid close to, but not touching, the LED power contacts.

To connect the power rails to the LEDS I soldered a small bare copper bridging wire between each of the power contacts on the LEDS and the appropriate polarity rail.

I screwed on a terminal block and created some connecting wires to be soldered on the the rails. This aids easy fitting and removal of the light.

The only thing left was to add a couple of eye screws on the back to mount the light to the ceiling and to run the power feed from the transistor connected to the PIR that controls the existing lights.

And test in place.

Pretty happy with how this prototype turned out. It can be used connected directly to a 12v power source (as seen here), in which case it's super bright, or it can be controlled by the automatic circuit where it gives a good glow and only draws 1 watt.