Create a Custom LED Painting

2023-06-11 | By bekathwia

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Today we’re making a painting dressed up with LEDs. It’s easy to customize to your own decor ‎theme and makes a great group workshop project as well.

Makers Night In with Becky Stern & Allie Weber | Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day

I first started working on this project for Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day, for which Nate ‎Larson had created this guide for an in-person activity. I worked on it during my livestream with ‎Digi-Key. It was super fun to chat with some of my favorite makers about how they got into DIY ‎electronics, and you can catch the replay.‎

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To make this project, you will need:‎‎

Canvas on a hollow frame‎
LED strips, rings, jewels, and/or individual pixels
Stranded wire
Soldering tools and supplies

‎Soldering iron DK #1691-1083-ND‎
Solder DK #2260-WBNCC633731-2OZ-ND‎
Wire strippers DK #1691-1281-ND‎
Flush cutters DK #1691-1037-ND
Pliers DK #1691-1422-ND or tweezers DK #1597-1536-ND
Eye protection DK #3M158306-ND‎
Workholding tool (often called a third hand) DK #1568-1077-ND
Multimeter DK #MN35-ND
Heat shrink tubing DK #1528-4559-ND
Heat gun (or a lighter) DK #1568-1602-ND
Solder wick DK #315-SOLDERWICK2.0-ND or a desoldering pump DK #243-1183-ND ‎for fixing mistakes‎

A microcontroller (I’m using an Arduino Micro)
Solder-type breadboard for building the circuit (not strictly necessary, but handy)‎‎
Hot glue gun
Canned air (optional but handy)
USB power adapter

You’ll need a canvas that’s stretched, so you have direct access to the back of the fabric, which ‎will diffuse the light. Other solid types of painting surfaces won’t let the light through.‎

You’ll also need some acrylic paint, brushes, something to protect your work surface, and your ‎choice of addressable LED pixels, whether it be a strip, rings, singles, or whatever your ‎preference.‎

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One way to plan your painting is to lay out the pixels on the front of the canvas and lightly sketch ‎around them to create a design– I’m drawing flowers.‎

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Then I’m going in with my black paint and filling in the design. Let the paint dry before adding the ‎electronics.‎

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During the recent livestream, I wired up the first NeoPixel ring to a microcontroller and hot-glued ‎it to the back of the canvas. My cohost Allie Weber made her own version of the painting project ‎too. Very cute.‎

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After the stream, I made a more permanent version of the circuit on a solder-type breadboard, ‎connecting up the pixels’ power and ground as well as the data input to a digital output pin on the ‎microcontroller, in my case an Arduino Micro.‎

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Then I continued connecting pixels to the chain, using small gauge stranded wire. You can find a ‎circuit diagram and complete parts list at the link in the description. I powered up the pixels using ‎some library sample code uploaded to the Arduino and flipped the painting over to see and align ‎the pixels to the artwork. Then I hot glued it in place, using a blast of canned air to rapidly cool ‎the glue before repeating with more pixels.‎

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After the circuit is complete, you can go in with a little more paint and touch up as needed. I’m ‎powering this thing with an old USB phone charger.‎

In Nate’s original guide, he shows how to use pixel strip, folded in half, upright and perpendicular ‎to the painting, using the hot glue as light pipes. This makes it possible to put two different ‎colored regions very close to each other while having nicely diffused light.‎

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