Workbench Light Controller

Jeremy writes:

OK, so about a year or so ago, I was working at my bench and I could not quite see what I was doing. I needed more light! I got so mad, I built this in about a half a day, and fixed the problem. Now I have enough light even when working on tiny things with magnifiers on my head.

I now have 4 white 12″ CCFL tubes, 6 1 watt warm white LED’s, 144 cool white LED’s (in strips), and 12 5mm diffused white LED’s under the bench pointed at the floor (did you ever drop anything?). All the LED’s are ramped on and off with PWM dimming as you will see in the video above. I also have 2 more channels available with full PWM dimming. Running everything wide open will allow you to see very well, and only consumes 17 watts.

A little overkill, but I was really frustrated. And hey, who just wants a plain ole boring switch anyway? Not me…

You can never have enough lights on your bench!

UPDATE: Jeremy has made a new explanatory video (above, bottom), and shared his source code. You can check out all that new goodness here.

Nice work, Jeremy!


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3 Comments

  1. Love it! I’m a workbench-lighting-overkill-aholic also; nothing as fancy, but still around a dozen lights. Shadows must die. 🙂

  2. Hi guys, I had some request for the code over on hackaday, so I just put up a new post with code and video explanation. Happy Hacking. 🙂
    http://thecustomgeek.com/?p=159

  3. Post updated! Thx Jeremy!

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