Posted on YBW, but thought I'd post here also, as I feel it's more applicable for small-medium boats than it is for medium- large boat owners.
For some time, I have wanted an RGB LED driver that I can install for the LED strips fitted in our cockpit. There are thousands available, many for under a tenner if you really want to go to the budget end of the market. But none seem to meet my requirements of being suitable for marine environments, and allwing for a neat and stealthy install (i.e. doesn't stick out like a sore thumb/uses same switchgear as the rest of the boat etc).
I therefore plan to design a single switch general purpose controller. The idea being that you dedicate an 'on/off' switch (in my case, the existing Carling switch that currently just turns on/off power to the LED strip controller). It would work as follows:
1. Switch on, and the lights come on (either in their last setting / standard colour / low level red 'safe light' - not sure which is best, but possibly it could be pre-selected by an internal switch at time of install).
2. To change colour, toggle the switch off-on quickly and the colours gently scroll. You can either leave the colours scrolling, or perform another off-on toggle to freeze the scrolling on its current colour.
3. To change the brightness (not really an oft-used function in my opinion), double toggle the switch (off-on-off-on) and the brightness gently fades in and out. An off-on toggle will freeze the brightness on its current level.
The toggling sounds cumbersome, but with a rocker/toggle switch, is actually reasonably easy/practical.
Critically, this will driver will have sufficient input filtering in order to prevent conducted emissions messing about with VHF radios (a common problem with the cheaper LED drivers, in my experience) and will be encapsulated with flying leads for waterproof splicing into connections to eliminate any corrosion/ingress protection problems. Based on other similar products I've developed, I expect the cost to buy would be around £40-60
Would this be of interest to others? Is it too limiting/seem like too much of a faff to install? Is there anything else that would make this more worthwhile?
I'm am going to make a one off, because I want one. I'm not expecting to scale it up massively, but even if there is a small market (through eBay or whatever) then I would like to go the extra mile to make a polished 'product' rather than a one off DIY job.
Read more at http://www.ybw.com/forums/showthread.ph ... mG6mhPm.99