Do you want to control the colour, intensity and temperature of the lightning using just your mobile? Then look no further as in this article we will be reading more about a reference design from Microchip, that enables you to control different parameters of LED strip using just a mobile phone.
The colour and temperature of lightning impact the ambience of an environment. The correct lighting can improve our productivity, and mood and in the long run can even impact our overall health. But it’s not practical to have multiple lights installed, and the advancement of LED technologies has allowed designers to control the intensity of light by controlling the voltage.
This reference design from Microchip can allow customers to drive two different colour LED strips, it can allow the users to control the temperature, colour and intensity of light. The reference design allows the user to control the settings through Bluetooth communication, it uses RN4871 Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) module which integrates Bluetooth 4.2 baseband controller, on-board Bluetooth stack, digital and analog I/O, and RF power amplifier into one solution.
The reference design employs a buck LED driver and an 8-bit PIC microcontroller to create an intelligent LED lighting system solution. The reference design takes an AC input from 50 to 265VAC. The image below show the solution diagram of the reference design.
Solution Diagram of the Light control reference design (source: Microchip)
Reference Design Key Features:
• Universal Input voltage: 120/230 VAC 50-60Hz
• Transformerless: reduces BOM cost and project dimension.
• Passive Power Factor Correction: it provides a PFC of at least 0.9 at 120Vac and 0.85 at 230Vac.
• RN4871 Bluetooth Low Energy 4.2 baseband controller: on-board Bluetooth stack, digital and analog I/O, and RF power amplifier into one solution.
• Dimming and temperature colour adjustment: by combining a basic buck LED driver (HV9961) featuring an 8-bit PIC16F15313 microcontroller.
• User friendly: this project comes with a Mobile Application for Android.
• The microcontroller and the BLE module is supplied offline using DN2470 (D-FET).
Design Resources
Microchip has validated this reference design and has also provided all the necessary design resources such as the BoM, Gerber file, schematics, software files, etc. to simplify the development of this reference design. You need to sign up to access the design files, you can get all the design resources here.
