LED DANCE FLOOR LIGHTING
ABOUT
A year before I got married, my now wife and I were deciding how we wanted to set up a dance floor. It was an outdoor wedding at my parents’ place and there was already a large slab of concrete that was perfect for a dance floor.
Great luck. But now what about lighting?
Well me being an overconfident electrical engineer thought “let’s just get some LED strip lights. Easy right?” – Wrong
It ended up taking an entire year of me working every weekend and almost every evening working and strategizing how to set this whole system up.
At one point I had given up because on the first version of the LED controller board, I had a connector with ground and power flipped. This resulted in two microcontroller boards getting simultaneously fried. This was also just after the pandemic and replacement microcontrollers were hard to find.
In the end, it all came together successfully.
I also wanted to be the DJ. It was kind of a bucket list dream of mine and with a captive audience I figured even if I stinked they would tolerate it. I think I was pretty good, but I don’t recommend DJing your own wedding (lots of work).
REQUIREMENTS
Worst case I needed the LED strips to just illuminate the dance floor.
Everything after that is just to enhance the event with impactful colors and beautiful patterns in sequence with the music.
High-level Requirements:
Illuminate the dance floor
Have a LED Controller that allows the DJ to switch between different light show effects (patterns, colors, etc)
A clean, compact, and professional looking setup
Nice to Haves:
As many patterns as possible including a twinkling lights pattern that looks like stars in the night
Resilient to rain and the hot summers heat
Can sync the lights to automatically strobe with the beat of the music. (was not successful)
Wanted to be able to manually strobe the light with the beat or music buildups
I wanted to be able to set up light effects on the controller and then “send them out” to the LED strips when I was ready. As opposed to the lights changing in real time while I was trying to tune in the effect that I wanted.
Wanted a randomize mode that would shuffle between different effects and colors. This was useful for whenever I wanted to leave the DJ table or was too busy with something else. This proved to be one of the best features.
Easy assembly and disassembly of the entire system.
I could leave the LED strips in the rain and quickly reconnect the LED Controller when it stopped.
The System
The final system consisted of the following parts:
LED Controller
12x RGBW LED strips (5 meters / 150LEDs).
Specifically, SK6812 RGBW 5 meters 30LED/meter IP65 from BTF-LightingLED Strip Connectors
5V 60A LED Power Supply.
Specifically, DC5V 60A Switch LED Power Supply Transformers from BTF-Lighting18V 1A AC/DC Wall Adapter such as the WSU180-1000 from Triad Magnetics.
All the mechanical parts to build the frame that held the LEDs above the dance floor.
