The story of MagWLED-1
MagWLED-1 started with a software engineer from Scandinavia learning electrical engineering in Florida during the pandemic and the idea of creating LED stick figure costumes for Halloween.
The first iteration was an ESP32, jumper cable, a proto board and some hand soldering. The LED strip and MCU were both powered from a USB battery pack at 5V. It worked well, but it was clunky, the wiring brittle and only 1 of the 3 costumes (mine) lasted all night.
The second iteration had a custom PCB to make things neater, but soldering the LED strip cables directly, without strain relief, made those solder joints weak and they didn't last long the first day of Halloween celebrations! For day 2, I tried to tighten things up with more heat shrink and strips.
It wasn't enough. First the capacitor came off and the lights started glitching. Second, the wires yet again were ripped uff at the soldering joints. Lastly, we started earlier on the second day and the LEDs were not bright enough in daylight / dusk. I wanted more light!
Revision three had several major updates.
It added a low-profile connector Wago connector - a massive improvement over the old direct-to-board soldering. The single, tall capacitor was replaced with two lower profile ones. It also had a microphone, but I found the novelty of Audio Reactive to wear off very quickly, so I scrapped this for the next iteration.
Perhaps most importantly, though, this was the first Power Delivery capable board, driving up to 12V. Not all of the components were ready for 12V, though, so there was some magic smoke...
Revision four, five and six added ESD protection and a fuse, improved mounting hole positioning, optimized current return paths, reduced EMI by going 4-layer, updated the switching regulator for the MCU, reduced the drop-out voltage of the level shifter LDO, added a MOSFET relay, increased the antenna cut-out and dozens and dozens of other tweaks.
The sixth version was so good that I decided that I'd manufacture some for others. It just needed a few more finishing touches!
MagWLED-1 is the eighth, and currently, final, iteration and it has enough power to power several meters of 12V strip, small enough to fit almost anywhere and durable enough to last whole Halloween attached to a 5-year old (testing with a 6-year old this year!).
It's perfect for many things and just works. I hope you'll like it too!
