Custom LED case lighting

nicknack125 · August 8, 2014

Just wanted to share this little project I've been working on for the past few days. I had a HC-06 Bluetooth Serial module laying around, so I figured I would hook it up to a microcontroller and some RGB LEDs to light up my build. So first off, let's start with the control board. I hooked up a spare attiny85 to the bluetooth serial module (plugged into the four pin female header in the top right of the board), allowing it to communicate with my phone over bluetooth. The large capacitor is there just to protect the LEDs from voltage spikes when booting up.

(attached in case, using 5V molex for power).

Next up is LED choice - I went with the Adafruit Neopixel 1M strip, because these are RGB LEDs that are individually addressable, meaning each one of them can be a separate color from the others, as shown in their product pic below. Even though I likely won't use this feature in my build, it can be fun to have a flashy rainbow pattern just to show off once in a while.

Finally, you're probably wondering how it looks. This is how it looks with specific LEDs lighting up the GPU (the white is much more blue in this pic).

This is the LEDs on a single color, cyan. I personally think this looks the best.

And this is how it looks with a random assortment of colors.

Thanks for taking your time to check this out! If any of you have suggestions on how to improve this, feel free to leave them in the comments, as feedback is greatly appreciated.