Make your wall art colorful at night with an LED strip backlight canvas. via instructables
Want to spruce up your home or room with an interesting piece of art? Want to add some unique lighting to your space? Using an LED strip, an Arduino, Canvas and paint, you can create your own wall art that’s not only unique during the day but also at night.
The following electronics/technology steps are based off of a tutorial on adafruit, Digital RGB LED Strip, with only minor modifications. Refer to their tutorial for more in depth information.
Step 1: Supplies
Here are the supplies I used:
• Electronics ( I used Adafruit to order the following parts)
• Digital RGB LED Weatherproof Strip- LPD 8806 32 LED (1 m)
• Female DC Power adapter- 2.1 mm jack to screw terminal block
• 5V 2 A switching power supply- UL Listed
• Arduino + power supply + USB cord
• Male-Female Jumper cables
• Red, Green, Blue, Black
• Art (this is up to what you want to design)
• Canvas (size is up to you)
• Acrylic Paint/Cardstock
• X-acto knife
• Masking Tape
• Cardboard (fits the back of the canvas)
• Command Velcro Strips
• Newspaper/tarp (to minimize any mess from paint)
• Tools
• Soldering Iron
• Heat shrink or hot glue
• Paint Brushes
Different supplies can be used, however, this project is based on using digital RGB LED strips not analog strips.
Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!
Featured Adafruit Product!
Digital RGB LED Weatherproof Strip – LPD8806 32 LED: These LED strips are fun and glowy. There are 32 RGB LEDs per meter, and you can control each LED individually! Yes, that’s right, this is the digitally-addressable type of LED strip. You can set the color of each LED’s red, green and blue component with 7-bit PWM precision (so 21-bit color per pixel). The LEDs are controlled by shift-registers that are chained up down the strip so you can shorten or lengthen the strip. Only 2 digital output pins are required to send data down. The PWM is built into each chip so once you set the color you can stop talking to the strip and it will continue to PWM all the LEDs for you.