DIY 12V RGB

[Mling]

So I have two 12V RGB strips providing an ambient colour to my case. I'd like to make some single LEDs to place around the case behind things like the cpu cooler. How do I get a LED like this? aliexpress?

[8tg]

You can do this pretty easily, albeit it’s very time consuming but not hard. Buy individual 12 volt rgb leds with drivers built in, then get to soldering them to the connectors of whatever rgb controller you’re using.

You can make your own little railed distributor board to run them in parallel easy with a very small diy breadboard.

The hard part is going to be soldering onto extremely small SMD leds, you won’t really find them anywhere with prongs to work with, you’re gonna be doing a lot of pad soldering, and it’s gonna be tiny and awful.

Then just glue dot them wherever you want, tuck away all the wires you run to your distributor board, and then plug that into the controller, DIY rgb leds.

 

[manikyath]

presuming you're not going for adressible RGB, it's pretty easy:

you can buy vareous formfactor RGB LEDs from just about any components supplier, you just need to make sure you match the 'common cathode' vs 'common anode' stuff, then you solder 4 leads to them, put a resistor on each color lead, put a connector on it, and call it a day.

 

common cathode has Ground/red/green/blue pinout, common anode has Vcc/red/green/blue.

for resistor values, it depends on the exact LED you get, esentially it's ohm's law: each color requires a certain current draw, you know the voltage, the spec sheet of the LED notes the reverse voltages, so you can math out the needed resistance value.