This product we developed for Maatrix LED Lights, Ahmedabad a company based in Ahmedabad city of Gujarat engaged in manufacture of various type of LED products like LED lights, sign boards, controllers etc. The aim was to design a product that can be used in place of cheap Chinese RGB LED controllers providing much better quality, higher power drive transistors (MOSFETs), new LED effects and finally a made in India tag! This controller could be used to control simple RGB LED based products such as LED strips and LED modules for sign boards and LED par lights.It has more than ten type of effects built in such as those found in Chinese RGB controllers and few new and unique effects.
To keep the cost low and face the competition against Chinese maker we have select STM8S003F3P3 MCU which is a powerful 8-bit microcontroller available at only Rs. 12/- through out India. The IC is available in 20 PIN TSSOP (SMD) package has 8KB flash memory and many PWM channels as required by this project.
This project required PWM based intensity control of three channels for RED, GREEN and BLUE LEDs.We used advance control timer TIM1 to generate these three PWMs. TIM1 has four PWM channels of which we need only three in this product.We have connected logic level mosfets on each channel to get higher current output required to drive long LED strips with hundreds of RGB leds. Each channel can provide current in range of 15 amps which is enough to drive several LEDs on each channel. We also have buttons to change the effect and the speed.
PCB was designed in single copper layer to keep the cost to minimum.
