Bedroom Lighting
I've spent some time working on the bedroom lighting. First job was to replace the abominable light fitting that was unfortunately included in the sale of the house. As seen here:
We had plenty of options, we went for a industrial style spotlight fitting.
Why go to all the effort of putting up a new light fitting and fitting a nice new posh switch ...
More interestingly, we have been keen on wiring in some LEDs around the room for a bit of mood lighting. From an electrical point of view, its not the most complex of things to do. tri-colour LEDS, resistors, wire and a PSU is all that is needed. I've got all but the LEDs knocking around anyways so it was never going to be a big job. We just so happened to be walking through Ikea when we came across 'Dioder'. LED strips with tri-colour LEDs (Red, Green, Blue) that can be faded into any colour. Not rocket science, but its actually 99% of the way towards what I was going to design anyways. At 30 quid, it saved me a lot of time designing.
So we are 99% of the way there, the problem is, the cables that come with the Dioder are only a meter or so long. We wanted to distribute the LEDS across the entire length of the room so I made a cable extension. Luckily, the power distribution unit that comes with Dioder uses off the shelf 4 pin molex connectors. I use them quite a lot with my electronics work so a pretty easy job. I used an off cut of Cat 5e cable and used 4 twisted pairs to extend the 3 voltage lines and 1 ground line to the LEDs at the opposite side of the room.
The extender is about 4 meters long so plenty to get from one side of the room to another going in and around various obstacles. The vast amount of the cable will be hidden under the carpet with the rest hid behind furniture.
We had plenty of options, we went for a industrial style spotlight fitting.
Why go to all the effort of putting up a new light fitting and fitting a nice new posh switch ...
More interestingly, we have been keen on wiring in some LEDs around the room for a bit of mood lighting. From an electrical point of view, its not the most complex of things to do. tri-colour LEDS, resistors, wire and a PSU is all that is needed. I've got all but the LEDs knocking around anyways so it was never going to be a big job. We just so happened to be walking through Ikea when we came across 'Dioder'. LED strips with tri-colour LEDs (Red, Green, Blue) that can be faded into any colour. Not rocket science, but its actually 99% of the way towards what I was going to design anyways. At 30 quid, it saved me a lot of time designing.
The extender is about 4 meters long so plenty to get from one side of the room to another going in and around various obstacles. The vast amount of the cable will be hidden under the carpet with the rest hid behind furniture.
