Bench lights (LED’s, CCFL’s, and a little overkill..)

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…

11 thoughts on “Bench lights (LED’s, CCFL’s, and a little overkill..)

  1. Pingback: Workbench Light Controller « adafruit industries blog

  2. Good work. Will you post details? Schematics, code, etc. Interesting to clone …
    Thank you

  3. +1
    Also,
    please post the arrangement of the lights as well 🙂 It would be nice to get ideas for how to design the lightningh over a workbench 🙂 Thanks and great work!

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  10. Although there are actually several fundamentals concerning LEDs which I want to research, I truly appreciate all you have written in this case for it helps me now have a much deeper knowledge.

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