USB Powered Light Strip ?

[Dicehunter]

Got myself an "Antec Soundscience Halo" light strip to attach behind my monitor for some ambient lighting -

Although I think it looks great is there any other company out there that does different colours ?

 

[spoffle]

You could hook one up yourself using RGB LEDs. I've literally just been looking on eBay at the parts needed for making up an RGB LED light strip. The only downside is that it's not USB powered

 

[mrk]

So these can be plugged into one of the 4 USB ports on my monitor so every time the monitor is on they light up and when it goes to sleep/or is off they power down? It's just what I have been after for a while and can use them on my hdtv as well!

 

[Mercutio]

I ended up building my own. Get a decent bit of strip board, some bright LEDs a resistor and you're in business.

To power it from USB you need to run each in parallel as most LEDs need decent voltage at pitifully low amps.

Basically rather than going:

+5v----LED-----LED-----LED-----LED----RESISTOR----GND

You go:

+5v----LED----RESISTOR----GND
    |--LED--|
    |--LED--|
    |--LED--|
    |--LED--|
    |--LED--|

with a resistor at the ground end of the circuit. There's a few LED power calculators around but I got 10 working from the USB hub on the side of the monitor.

Edit: Yup, mine powers up with the monitor, stays on when it's asleep and off when I power it off.

So if you take something like: http://www.coolcomponents.co.uk/catalog/super-bright-white-p-565.html (electrical components so I don't think they class as a competitor, mods, kill the link if needed and sorry).

These are 3.4V 20mA LEDs.

Most USB ports are 500mA @ 5V.

Using http://www.hebeiltd.com.cn/?p=zz.led.resistor.calculator's parallel calculator and 10 LED's in parallel we need an 8ohm/0.533w resistor.

USB wires have 4 leads:

Pin Colour Function
1   Red    +5v
2   White  +data
3   Green  -data
4   Black  -5v(GND)

So you basically strip an old lead, tape up the data wires (so they aren't connected to anything or each other) then start soldering. You could do it with a bunch of wires and some holes drilled in a plastic ruler/however you like, I used stripboard. Each LED has to be logically connected to the +5v end of the circuit separately (so the amps are split rather than the volts) with the resistor soldered to the gnd/-5v wire and each LED wired seperately back to it.

Might sound complicated, really isn't.

 

[Dicehunter]

So these can be plugged into one of the 4 USB ports on my monitor so every time the monitor is on they light up and when it goes to sleep/or is off they power down? It's just what I have been after for a while and can use them on my hdtv as well!

I used them on my HDTV as well for a while but moved them to my monitor as I spend more time with it.