Rainbow LED lit Bookshelf

I picked up a pair of these bookshelves on my trip to IKEA a few months ago, the first was big enough enough to hold all our books, while the second was put in the sitting room and its used for storage thanks to the cute little storage boxes designed to fit the slots.

I've wanted to make an interesting project with LED's for a while now, and lighting up the bookshelf seemed like it might be the perfect opportunity. I spent an evening searching for RGB LEDS on Adafruit, Cool Components and Sparkfun. I decided to order 25 x 10mm Cycling RGB LED

and some wire spools to link the LED's together. The items arrived earlier this evening much to my excitement, the first thing I did when I got home was break out the soldering iron and get that sucker plugged in!

I placed a simple circuit, with two groups of two LED's in series, in parallel and powered them using the bread board PSU. the LED's slowly cycled through the various colours in the rainbow over about 30 - 45 seconds. I figured if I wanted to light up the empty slots in the bookshelf I'd need about 8 or so LED's, so I double checked to see if I could run 4 groups of 2 LED's without issue.

The PSU seems to have no issue powering all 8, so I got to work measuring wire lengths to ensure they would reach the various points at the back of the bookshelf. I next begun to solder the LED's onto the wires one leg at a time!

Then the other leg!

I did a quick test to ensure the connections were sound by plugging the strand of two LED's in series in to the PSU.

I did a quick and dirty job isolating the contacts with some tape.

 

Once I was happy I could repeat the process, I reproduced another pair of LED's in series and tested those. I next fixed the PSU, breadboard and some on board LED's to the top of one of the lower shelves and ran the two strands behind the shelf.

It's not quite finished yet, I'll get around to it over the next few days, I've already cut the wire strands, I just need to solder the LED's etc. I'm pretty happy with how its turned out so far tho :).

I salvaged an old wall wart from a long dead DSL modem which fit the bread board PSU, and provided 12V and 2A. So excluding the cost of the shelves, and the wall wart, the other components worked out at about 30 - 40 Euro. I'm sure you could pick up a ready made solution on Ebay etc, but I had a great evening I must say :)


breadboard power-supply 5v-3.3v
Cycling RGB LED
Hookup Wire Black
Hookup Wire Red