Hardware - Stained glass windows project

This post is part of a series on the stained glass windows project.

Below is the hardware and parts that I am using this project.

6 mm semi-transparent white acrylic

6 mm is the most common and cheapest thickness of acrylic that is available. This acrylic is 60% transparent creating a good difusion pattern to scatter the LED light. I also have a bunch of it that I salvaged from a dumpster behind a sign shop.

Square 12mm WS2812B RGB LEDS (NeoPixels)

The WS2812 RGB LEDs are cheap on Aliexpress as most people are moving to the better APA106 version. I picked up a few thousand of these square versions a few years ago in a massive group buy and I am still making my way through the stockpile.

I selected the square version over the bullet version to keep the profile of the panels smaller.

Wemos D1 mini ESP8266 with Arduino firmware

For most of my projects I have moved on to using the Adafruit HUZZAH32 - ESP32 Feather Board as the CPU speed is much better then ESP8266, but I have a stockpile of these older chips and the requirements of this project are well within the capability of the ESP8266.

The hardware is a $3 Wemos d1 mini

I am using the ESP826 arduino core library, and FastLED.

5 volt 5 amp AC to DC power supply

Each LED at full brightness consumes 60 mA, normally running at 20 mA. Each panel has between 30-45 LEDs. With a total of 7 panels. I needed around 6 Amps power supply but Power supplies larger than 5 Amps is expensive. I programed the LEDs to be 20% darker than their max, to reduce the power requirement to be less than 5 Amp so I could use this cheaper power supply.