Light Board

A custom PCB for home lighting with WiFi features.

Design

The purpose of this project was to serve as a way to have controllable lighting in my dorms without relaying on 3rd paraty services like Phillps Hue, Tuya, or Govee.

One of the problems I had early on was finding a way to distribute power across the boards. Having a power connector for each board was impratical and the lights consume too much power to have the project be battery based. The solution was to have a 5V power connector for input then daisy chain USB C cables. This solution was wildly inefficent (and probably would've caught fire!).

The second generation makes the design much larger, drops the 5V LDO that was giving thermal problems in favor of power from USB, and increases the amount of capacitors.

Next Steps

I'm completely redesigning these lights as well as integrating them into a IoT system. One of the biggest issues I had with these lights is the power system so I'm also doing more research into that before continuing. As for right now, the test batch I made works for the most part and is able to be controlled via WiFi.