我做了一个小LED面板。

我做了一个小LED面板。
I made a small LED panel

原始链接: https://www.stavros.io/posts/really-small-led-panel/

该项目详细介绍了制作一个小型8x8 WS2812 LED面板的过程，源于对这类显示屏的购买癖好。作者旨在试验WLED，一款出色的LED控制软件，并专注于实现适当的光扩散以获得干净的视觉效果。为了扩散单个LED，作者3D打印了一个半透明的PLA方块，并将其放置在距离面板10毫米的位置，以平衡亮度和色彩分离。一个ESP8266微控制器被巧妙地（且有些鲁莽地）连接到外壳的*背面*，以避免笨重的设计，优先考虑功能而非整洁度。最终的迷你LED面板成功显示了WLED中的图案。尽管制作过程很有趣，但作者承认自己有制作这些显示屏的习惯，享受制作过程，然后让它们闲置——最终导致一个更大的32x32面板也堆放在墙上积灰！

## 小型LED面板项目总结这次Hacker News讨论围绕着一位创作者（stavros.io）的小型8x8 LED面板项目，该项目使用了WS2812 LED和漫射器来创造流畅的动画。创作者详细介绍了制作过程，并引发了关于修改和替代方案的讨论。关键点包括：关于重塑面板的讨论（建议定制PCB比切割/焊接更容易），使用漫射来提高感知分辨率，以及替代LED技术，如更小的可寻址LED。许多评论者分享了他们自己的相关项目，包括更大的横幅和艺术装置。对话还涉及技术方面，例如使用更高功率LED时的散热管理，使用WLED等软件控制LED，以及漫射器使用的材料（PLA）。一个反复出现的主题是这些项目的吸引力源于创造性的限制以及使用相对简单的组件可以实现的令人满意的视觉效果。

原文

It's small

I bought a really small 8x8 LED panel a while ago because I have a problem. I just can’t resist a nice WS2812 LED panel, much like I can’t resist an e-ink display. These days I manage to stay sober, but once in a while I’ll see a nice cheap LED panel and fall off the wagon. It has now been thirteen minutes that I have gone without buying LED panels, and this is my story.

My story

The LED panel in question, your honor.

This isn’t really going to be super interesting, but there are some good lessons, so I thought I’d write it up anyway. On the right you can see the LED panel I used, it’s a bare PCB with a bunch of WS2812 (Neopixel) addressable LEDs soldered onto it. It was the perfect excuse for trying out WLED, which I’ve wanted to take a look at for ages, and which turned out to be absolutely fantastic.

As with every light-based project, one of the big issues is proper diffusion. You don’t want your LEDs to show up as the points of light they are, we really like nice, big, diffuse lights, so you need a way to do that. My idea was to print a two-layer white square out of PLA (which would be translucent enough to show the light, but not so translucent that you could see the LEDs behind it. I also printed a box for the square to go in front of:

I bet you're glad I included this complicated assembly photo, aren't you?

I printed the diffuser (the white square) first, held it over the LED panel and increased or decreased the distance of the square from the LEDs until the LEDs didn’t look like points, but the colors also didn’t blend into the neighboring squares’ colors. This turned out to be around 10mm, so that’s how thick I made the box.

The eagle-eyed among you may want to seek medical assistance, but if you have normal human eyes, you may have noticed that there’s nowhere in the box for the microcontroller to go, and you would be correct. For this build, I decided to use an ESP8266 (specifically, a WeMos dev board), but I didn’t want to make the whole box chunky just to fit a small microcontroller in there, so I did the next best thing:

I designed a hole in the back of the box for the cables that connect to the LED panel, and I glued the ESP8266 to the back of the box. YOLO.

Look, it works great, ok? The cables are nice and shortish, even though they go to the entirely wrong side of the thing, the USB connector is at a very weird place, and the ESP8266 is exposed to the elements and the evil eye. It’s perfect.

Here’s the top side, with the diffuser:

The top side, with the diffuser.

And here’s the whole mini tiny cute little panel showing some patterns from WLED (did I mention it’s excellent? It is).

So cute.

Epilogue

That’s it! I learned a few things and made a cute box of lights. I encourage you to make your own, it’s extremely fun and mesmerizing and I love it and gave it to a friend because I never used it and it just took up space and then made a massive 32x32 version that I also never use and hung it on my wall.

Please feel free to Tweet or toot at me, or email me directly.