LED DANCE FLOOR LIGHTING
LED Strips and Connector Boards
LED SELECTION
LED Voltage
For the best lighting patterns and effects, I needed individually addressable LEDs to be able to control each LED as I wished. At the time this limited me to LEDs that are powered off 5V. There were other LED options available that could have been powered from 12V or 24V, but they were not individually addressable (typically you could control groups or 3 or 5 LEDs). Now it looks like you can buy 12V and 24V LED strips that are individually addressable.
The benefit to higher voltage LED strips is that it reduces the maximum current that your power supply and system must handle. Suppose you calculated a maximum current of 10A when all your 5V LEDs are on at full brightness. All other things being equal, on a 12V LED strip your maximum current is about
10A x (5V / 12V) = 4.2A
And on a 24V LED strip, your maximum current is about
10A x (5V / 24V) = 2.1A
This significantly reduces your power supply requirements and the current handling capability of any connectors, wires, etc of your system. I should mention that this only holds true if the higher voltage LED strips have the same LED current. This may not be true, but I would still expect lower current with the higher voltage LED strips overall.
Another key benefit is that there will be less current flowing down your LED strips, you get less voltage drop between LEDs due to the resistance in the LED strips themselves of the connecting wires in your system. This starts becoming a problem as your LED strip gets longer and the voltage seen by the LEDs furthest away becomes less. It can get to the point where there isn’t enough voltage at the LED to properly power them. This results in the brightness and color of the LED strip at the ends to be different than the LEDs at the beginning. A higher voltage LED strip with lower current should help this by minimizing the voltage drop over the length of the LED strip.
In any case, at the time I only was able to use 5V individually addressable LED strips.
Final Selection
Another feature that I wanted was to have an LED strip with a dedicated white led. You can of course get a white-ish light by turning on the red, green, and blue LEDs but this would not be a super nice white. It would have been close to a white, but I wanted to do a stary night LED effect and having crisp white LEDs would be beneficial. Another benefit to a dedicated white LED is that it would use less current than having all three red, green, and blue LEDs on simultaneously. As a result, I wanted an RGBW LED strip, and I ended up choosing the SK6812 RGBW 5 meters 30LED/meter (or 150 LEDs per strip) IP65 from BTF-Lighting.
Max BTF-LIGHTING SK6812 LED RGBW strip current consumption:
None/black: uA
Red: mA
Green: mA
Blue: mA
White: mA
For comparison here is the max BTF-LIGHTING WS2812B RGB ECO LED strip current consumption:
None/black: 490uA
Red: 12.7mA
Green: 6.2mA
Blue: 12.5mA
White: 35.9mA
The last thing about the LED strips is related to the dance floor size and the spacing between the LED strips themselves. My dance floor was about 5 meters long and 5 meters wide. Since we already buy 5 meter long LED strips, the 5 meter length of my dance floor works perfectly. The width on the other hand is different but not very challenging. Ideally you would have the entire width made from LED strips, but this would require lots of current (power) to run this many LEDs and a lot more processing power for the patterns/effects. So, I was trying to figure out what the minimum number of LED strip are required to still have a good dance floor lighting experience. With some thought and running LED strips on my bedroom roof to get a feel for it, I concluded that a gap of about 0.5 meters was reasonable. In a 5 meter width this equates to about 12 LED strips.
Max LED strip currents (using 12x 5 meter of the SK6812):
None/black: uA
Red: mA
Green: mA
Blue: mA
White: mA
CONNECTOR BOARDS
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).
