Modding a fan controller for use within shelving

Well... after like a week of painting, it's all done :D

Here is the shelf all primed up and ready to be painted black!

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and here is all the shelf painted black :) (As you can tell from the above picture to the below picture, painting takes a long time! :D)

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I put the LED strip in to see how they look and it looks awesome! I don't think I'm going to need to dim it anymore. I'll see though once it's being used properly etc.

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I'm putting all the fans in, the controller, and ALL the wires in place ready to put on the wall, then it's a matter of plugging stuff in. The LED's in the fans... I'm going to hold off on that at the moment, I think the LEDS I'm putting at the back of the shelf will hopefully make the fans looks awesome. If they don't look as awesome as I expect them to be, then I'll be putting the LEDS in the fans.

ARGH, work today is going slow because tonight is the good bit!! :D
 
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Thanks mate. The painting took a surprising amount of time!

Also, you really are racking up the post counts :D I'm pretty sure at the beginning of this thread you was on like 340 something :D
 
That shelf does have a nice blue glow coming from it. Would be nicer if it were Orange but you can't have everything. :) Nice paint job though. MDF is such a pain to paint as it's so absorbent.

The LED mod is more for the prettiness of the fan, rather than for shedding light into a system. With 3mm 20-30 degree FOV LEDs most of the light goes straight to the blades and the fan hub, although this does rather depend on the fan itself. A shiny, reflective fan will bounce light everywhere, whereas a matt fan will tend to absorb the light a lot better.

You can see this effect, somewhat, in my video below.


The fan on the left is a standard black fan with orange painted blades (I think), just a little reflective but mostly matt. The fan on the right is a semi-transparent LED fan from Alpenfohn. You can visibly see how much extra light the semi-transparent one gives to it's surrounding. I think the semi-transparent fan makes this mod look great.
 
It's not RPM controlled. The circuit uses a potentiometer to adjust the timing of a 555 timer chip. I suppose the hall sensor output from the fan could be sensed and used to tick the 555 over but I never looked into that. The design was to adjust the speed of the LED sweep from a PC front panel dial and just to suit a mood. I never installed it though.
 
My bad. I assumed what you were changing was both fan speed and speed of LED sweep.

Worked in arcade game industry moddind/repairing cabinets and the like. Took me forever to figure out how the video games with players shooting at screen worked. I could not come up with any way the gun shooting at screen that the screen could know where it hit. ;)
 
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Oh god mate now you've got me thinking about modifying the circuit to incorporate the use of the fan's hall sensor to provide feedback to the speed of the spinning LEDs instead of input from the 555 timer.
 
Tealc said:
That shelf does have a nice blue glow coming from it. Would be nicer if it were Orange but you can't have everything. :) Nice paint job though. MDF is such a pain to paint as it's so absorbent.

The LED mod is more for the prettiness of the fan, rather than for shedding light into a system. With 3mm 20-30 degree FOV LEDs most of the light goes straight to the blades and the fan hub, although this does rather depend on the fan itself. A shiny, reflective fan will bounce light everywhere, whereas a matt fan will tend to absorb the light a lot better.
Click to expand...

Thanks mate, the primer was a right pain in the arse to be fair, especially on the cuts. The primer kinda of just dissappeared! I have got a little more touching up to do, not much though.

Well I'm hoping the ropelight will make the fans look pretty without the modding, but I think eventually, I'll end up modding because I'll get bored :cool: Doing that to my fans is more than I can manage at the moment :D Bloody good job though Tealc, they look gorgeous spinning round like that.

I got started on placing all the wires in the shelf last night. It took longer than I expected because of planning where everything was being routed without overlapping wires too much.

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Tealc said:
Oh god mate now you've got me thinking about modifying the circuit to incorporate the use of the fan's hall sensor to provide feedback to the speed of the spinning LEDs instead of input from the 555 timer.
Click to expand...

Oh god, I hate it when you get an idea planted into your head. You've just got to go ahead and do it otherwise it bugs the hell out of ya :D
 
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Tealc, I need your help :D which on which? Haha. I really need to get down to the theory of electrics!
The wires at the back are the leds and the three wires at the front are from a three pin fan connector, so I can put it on my fan controller.
 
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I actually tried, but with no luck :(

LEDS Wires - fan connector wires
Yellow/green - Yellow
Brown - Red
Blue - Black
 
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Sorry didn't notice you'd made a post.

The Red is the positive, the Black is the ground. Yellow is not needed for the LEDs.

I'm not really getting why your LEDs seem to have a 3 core mains cable.

Is there some kind of box on the end of that mains cable?
 
Ahh no problem tealc, I really do appreciate your help :)

Yeah there is a very small box on the mains cable before it gets to the leds. Is it a problem? :(
 
Normal LEDs just need two wires to operate. They are simply a wire carrying a DC voltage and another which is ground, positive and negative if you like. What you have there appears to be a mains cable with the end hacked off. Mains cable carries AC voltage that LEDs can't work with. I assume that this little box is a power supply for the LEDs. If so it'll probably be marked as such with input and output voltages and stuff.

Is there some wire after this little box before it goes into the LEDs and does it look different to the cable you pictured?

How are the LEDS normally powered? Plug in wall?
 
The box itself isn't marked at all, its totally plain and where you see the cut wires in the pictures, that is after the power supply box. So where you see the cuts, them wires go straight into the LED rope light.

Really sorry about the delayed responses, I'm currently laying network cable under my floorboards and into different rooms.
 
How about a picture of the whole led rope assembly, little box, power supply and all.

At the moment I just can't figure out why LEDs would have 3 wires. The only time 3 wires are used is for two colour LEDs.
 
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