I have a computer desk with a hutch and unfortunately not enough light reaches my keyboard and desk surface. So I wanted to add a light. (Cue the comedic music)
Phase 1
I had a spare LED light left over from when I was installing them for room lighting around the house. It is about the same size as a 4 foot fluorescent bulb fixture which turned out to be too big for the lip on the front of the hutch so I drilled some holes inside the hutch cabinets to the wire tie it to the back. This as you may suspect lit up the wall behind my monitors making them harder to see and my keyboard was still somewhat in the shadow of the display. It was better then nothing but not the right solution.
Phase 2
My next bright idea was to use RGB LED strip lighting because that would just look so cool. So I bought a spool of 5050 RGB LEDs. Actually, I bought it for another project but that one only needed a couple feet off the spool but I used the controller it came with for that project. Because I didn’t have
a controller I connected it to my variable power supply and figured out that the +V goes to the black wire and the Red, Greeen, and Blue wires connect to ground to turn the LEDs on. I then found a 12V 2A power supply I wasn’t using anymore and wired it to the strip tying the three colors together to GND. This means that all three LEDs should have the same current running through them. This does not actually produce white because each LED color has a different forward voltage so the light was more of a blue-white.
However, after about 24-hours of being left on it started to flash. I checked the supply and it was overheating which was causing it to perform short thermal shutdown cycles. I then dug up an old 12V 5A supply and wired that to the strip which did the trick.
Phase 3
For ultimate coolness I needed an LED strip controller. So I ordered one online along with some screw terminal power connectors to make rewiring easier.
I only needed to use the male part of the rewiring connector because the controller already had the female part. Unfortunately, both the part that connects to the LED strip and the controller connector are both female. So I am going to need to find a 4pin male to male connector or just some stiff wires of thr right gauge.
