Three Channel LED Controller
The BOM and schematic can be found at the bottom of this page - BUT DO NOT BUILD THIS BOARD.
Why not build it, OK I did and that is the only person who should need to do this. The reason I built this was two fold:
I wanted to make a CAN based wired controller for the LEDs in my basement. I have never understood why I need to put the house's wireless in so many places that I'm just asking to be hacked, so wired seems like a good idea. I mean, you need to power the thing anyways, why not wire in the data connection? Answer, short of Ethernet there is no reasonable network stack to get into any IoT control system.
I wanted to design a discrete FET driver from transistors. OK, I can cross that one off having done the design and building one. It is a good thing to do, a discrete transistor implementation is much cheaper than the cheapest FET driver, but, that's done now.
So those are the reasons to make your own lighting controller and their counter arguments. The real reason to never make you own controller is:
H801 LED WiFI Controller Order this from Aliexpress for $8.00 and you get something in a case, its own power supply, a profile supported in Tasmota and every other ESP8266 firmware and it even comes with the connectors to attach to your wires.
It is, by the way, a FIVE channel controller - two more outputs than the one I designed. It runs on anything from 24 to 5 volts so connect whatever light strip you want.
But yes, it is WiFi based. I've come to the conclusion I need a partitioned WiFi system anyways to keep Amazon and Google away from my file server and other stuff. I mean I've got a "smart" TV that I can find no way to turn off its own configuration AP, I really need to create two LANs if I want any security.
