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“I’ve got a bit of a thing for lights and being able to remotely control them. I particularly like this in the garden and even better if i can solar power them. I have some of the pound/dollar store stake lights but they are rather weak so i started to look around and found that the dollar/pound store also sold small pillar lights that i would be able to repurpose. I then stripped it down and retro fitted three 1w LED’s and a ESP8266 wifi micro controller which shall allow me to control the light remotely either manually or via timer/events. The board i purchased can take 5 but on working out the voltage i would need more than 12v to drive them at full brightness and i didn’t want to have to setup up the voltage as that would require another component so i settled on 3 which works nicely, i bridged two of the LED positions as they are in series so leaving them connected wasn’t an option. I am using a dedicated Led driver board as these 1w led’s must only be driven with 350ma of current, the beauty of this board is that it will increase the foward voltage if you increase extra LED’s upto a maximum of 10. It must be noted however that each led shall take 3.3v so if you are planning on running 10 LED’s then you shall require an input voltage of 33v, just below the units 35v rated maximum. As we are driving 3 LED’s which require at least 9.9v which works great with out 12v supply. The other great feature of this board is that it has a pwm connection so that you can vary the brightness of the light by connecting it to a PWM pin on a microcontroller and sending the correct signal. This is excellent as it negates the need for any other hardware bar a step down converter to get 3.3v for the ESP 8266 board.”

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