Scott Gibson from The Great Geekery was looking for photography lights for a photo booth project for his friend’s wedding. When he realized how expensive they are, he decided to build his own. Check out the tutorial here and try it yourself!
The photo booth I’m building runs on a raspberry pi embedded computer. Attached to the raspberry pi is a PCA8685 I2C PWM driver. Adafruit sells a nice breakout board to make wiring it up easy. This way the photobooth control software can simply set the desired PWM duty cycle and be done with it. The PWM output of the PCA8685 is connected to a mosfet which switches the LEDs on and off at the right duty cycle to set the brightness.
I designed a simple four channel low-side mosfet switch board for connecting the LEDs (and other DC things) which needed control from the raspberry pi. The hardware design is open source and can be found here…
See them in action below! Read more…
Featured Adafruit Products!
Adafruit 16-Channel 12-bit PWM/Servo Driver – I2C interface – PCA9685; You want to make a cool robot, maybe a hexapod walker, or maybe just a piece of art with a lot of moving parts. Or maybe you want to drive a lot of LEDs with precise PWM output. Then you realize that your microcontroller has a limited number of PWM outputs! What now? You could give up OR you could just get this handy PWM and Servo driver breakout.