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Acrylic water block + controlled RGB leds?

post #1 of 2
11/1/12 at 10:40am
Thread Starter 
My XSPC Razor water block has two 3mm LED holes.



I was hoping to use RGB LEDs and somehow cycle or choose colors.
How can I implement this, as cheaply as possible?
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Mein Comp (WC)
(14 items)
 
HTPC / Light gaming
(8 items)
  		 
CPUMotherboardGraphicsRAM
Core i5-3570k Delidded @ 4.8GHz  ASRock Z77 Extreme4 EVGA GTX 690 16GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3-1600 (9-9-9-24) 
Hard DriveHard DriveOSMonitor
Corsair Force GT SSD, 240GB RAID 0: 2x Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200.14 Windows 7 Ultimate x64 Nvidia Surround - (3x) 27" (Hanns-G HL272HPB) 
KeyboardPowerCaseMouse
Logitech G15 Corsair TX850W Lian Li Lancool Dragonlord PC-K62 Logitech G700 
Audio
X-Fi Titanium 
View all
CPUMotherboardGraphicsRAM
AMD A10-5800K ASRock FM2A85X Extreme4-M AMD Radeon 6670 - AMD Dual Graphics 4GB Crucial Ballistix DDR3-1866 
Hard DriveCoolingMonitorCase
320GB Western Digital 72k Xigmatek Loki SD963 92mm Logitech K400 Apevia X-QPACK-NW-BK/420 
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post #2 of 2
11/7/12 at 2:31pm
Two ways of controlling colors in an RGB LED:

1. Use some sort of microcontroller to PWM modulate each of the three colors in the LED. There are very tiny microcontrollers available (bare chip) which can be had for a couple bucks, but you will need some additional (relatively inexpensive) hardware to program them. They can be wired into your lighting circuit "dead bug" style and sleeved over or hidden easily. Include a pushbutton or two to change color/flash modes that you have preprogrammed. Or you can go all-out using an Arduino or other microcontroller, have USB control if you want to program up an interface, set the LEDs to flash to music, show status reports or just about anything else you can come up with.

2. Hook each color of the LED to a variable resistor. You can then "dial in" the color you want. Simple and cheap, but no flashing modes. Bonus is you can wire a few of these in parallel so they're all in sync.

I haven't seen 3mm RGB LEDs available on the market. The ones I am familiar with are 5mm (T 1 3/4) size package.

There is another option for you... there are RGB LEDs available with a tiny chip embedded in them, two varieties that will change colors fast (flash) or slow (fade). Used singly, these are an option and they are available in 3mm size. Very cheap on EBay and the simplest method for adding changing color effects.
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