The high power LEDs are there 🙂
5 pieces rated at 3W, which is roughly equivalent to a 40W light bulb.
But unfortunately I didn’t do my homework; they are not running with 12V, but with much less.
I could regulate the excess voltage by just turning it into heat with a resistor, but this seems a) highly inefficient, and b) every LED will get hot and needs at least a passive heatsink — with even more heat I surely need active cooling, which i would like to avoid.
The other possibility is a constant voltage / current source, which regulates the voltage (and current) more efficiently. Without much cons, in contrast to possibility heat.
One way to control the brightness of a led can be by controlling the current in the circuit. A raspberry pi (rpi) is not able to control the current, and the final power source will anyway not be a rpi.
Another one is PWM, which stands for pulse-width modulation.1 PWM basically switches the current on and off very fast, so that the average is as desired. And this should also work with an external power supply.
The external power goes through an MOSFET, which en/disables the current. the MOSFET is controlled by the PWM from the rpi. But not directly, because the MOSFET needs more voltage than the rpi can supply … therefore we need a sub-circuit. This sub-circuit consists of the rpi, which controls a NPN transistor, which in turn switches current from the external power supply on/off (PWM) to finally control the MOSFET.
The code is very simple at the moment. Just enable the GPIO stuff, and then vary the PWM signal from 0 to 100 and back again. I have to checkout wiringpi — it seems RPi.GPIO can only support software PWM, while wiringpi can support hardware PWM.
import RPi.GPIO as IO
import time
IO.setmode (IO.BCM)
IO.setup(16,IO.OUT)
p = IO.PWM(16, 100)
p.start(0)
try:
while(1):
for x in range(100):
p.ChangeDutyCycle(x)
time.sleep(0.1)
for x in range(100):
p.ChangeDutyCycle(100-x)
time.sleep(0.1)
except KeyboardInterrupt:
p.stop()
IO.cleanup()
This project aims at providing a wake-up light, which gradually gets brighter until it’s time to wake up. I try to write a post for every bigger step, in order to document how I made it.
The initial idea is to drive some leds (high power ones, like in light bulbs) through an external power supply, while controlling the brightness with PWM and a raspberry pi. Also some music or alarm beeper, because I really don’t believe lights alone can wake me up on time. A cron timer, which starts the “countdown”, should be sufficient as starter. The countdown script will then control the light, beeper, and a physical button will close it.
No need for snooze, different wake-times, or other fancy stuff at the beginning.
