Make Heart LED Light for Valentines Day

Hey Creators in this instructables i have come up with a special project!

As the Valentines day is around the corner our special ones deserved the most unique gifts, In my opinions for a creator his creation is the most exciting thing!

I have made a LED Heart that can display any possible color that exists and also almost every pattern one can think of.

The coolest part is you can control the colors and patterns of this LED heart with any smartphone , ipad or laptop, Only one thing that plays role here is Wi-Fi connectivity.

This project is a fast build since i have kept in mind that most of them cant resist to build such projects.

With these things being said let us directly hop in to make this Programmable heart for your valentine.

• Wemos D1 mini
• WS2812B Led Strips
• Jumper wires
• 3D printer
• PLA filament
• Hot glue
• Soldering Iron
• Superglue
• White sheet of paper
• Paper glue and scissors
• USB cable and a computer
• Smartphone/computer to control
• Valentine to gift this heart!!

I have designed this heart and other part using Tinkercad, This was very easy and it took me less than an hour to finish both the parts for this project.

Once i giot my stl files i have sliced the parts using Cura Slicer, You can use the slicer as per your needs but in most of the cases cura does the job.

I have fed the desigs to my 3d printer and used red and white PLA filament to print the parts, The overall print time for this project was 57mins in my case, i have used no supports to priht and the infill rate was 40%.

After you have the printed parts we can head over to building the project.

If you don't have 3d printer, you can use 3d printing services from pcbway at very affordable price.

The LED strip used in this project is special compared to the normal led strip, This LED strip has connection terminals where as the regular LED strip has just 2.

The ws2812b also called as ARGB led strip has 3 input pins, 5v, negative and the Din pin.

I have used the ends of female jumper wire to solder to these terminals, Make sure to select the type of wire ends depending on the wemos d1 mini board pins.

Solder the wires by making small scratches on the surface of strip this will make the soldered points stronger.

To add an extra layer of strength i have poured a small amount of hot glue over this soldered joints.

The length of the strip depends on the size of the heart shape and in my case a 14cm strip did the job dont forget to measure yours.

The double sided adhesive really saves a lot of additional effort to stick the strip to the surfaces.

Start by peeling off the LED strip adhesive tape and insert the sticky ends inside the printed heart, Repeat this untill all the inside layer is filled with strip lights, Start in such a way that the wires should come at the botttom.

This is becase the 3d print design of the base is made in such a way that base has slots for holding the wires that comes out from the strip.

Now add the base box, But before pull the wires from inside out, Secure the part using descent amount of hot glue.

If the quality of adhesive that you are using is not good, secure the LED strip using superglue.

The circuit for this project is really simple and every creator will enjoy making this easy circuit.

We are using only 3 pins from the Wemos D1 Mini, 5v pin, Gnd and D4.

The connections are straight to the point and no additional hardware is necessary, This makes the wiring part easy and also ensures this can be encased in a box.

Connect the jumper wires from LED strip to wemos board, 5v to 5v pin, Gnd to Gnd pin and Di to D4 pin of the controller.

After the circuit is complete close the wemos board using the 3d printed part, Use small amount of superglue to close the lid, The lid has a groove to conenct the board with USB.

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We are not using Arduino IDE to program this wemos d1 mini board instead we are using ESPHome-Flasher

If you dont have this application just search it on github or simply download this from the above link.

Install this as per your system specifications. Connect the board to the computer and open the application.

Refresh the port and select the port, Now for the firmware part select the WLED_0.11.0_ESP8266 file

Now press on the flash ESP option and wait for few seconds untill the code are uploaded to the board successfully, Unplug the board and now the board is ready for use

The LED strip give colors and it spreads that results in loss of brighnessm, to fix this issue all we need is a diffuser.

I have simply cut pieces of paper and later glued to the frames of heart.

The paper glue took me around 30mins to dry completely, Add small amount of glue to the sides of heart shaped frame.

After the part is dry, Trim the excess paper using scissors. Give a detailed cut so we have high quality surface finish in the edge of the heart shape.

Now we are almost done, only one thing pending is powering this up using the WLED panel and we will see that in the next step.

Controlling this LED heart is very very easy when you compare to the feelings for your valentine!

You can control the Light colors and patterns of light by following the below steps.

Note: This step remains same for Phone/Ipad/Laptop/Computer.

-Connect the wemos board to any USB power supply using a USB cable.

-Turn the Wi-Fi to on and wait for the name to pop up "WLED-AP" Now connect to this network.

-If it asks for the PW, wled1234 and click on join, after you do this a pop up window opens that has a control panel.

-You can choose the colors you want or choose the effects, the changes are real time.

By this way you can control the LED heart and give life to it digitally, i hope you will try to build this project, if you have more questions you can ask in the comments

The entire tutorial in the form of video is given here, You must check the working of this LED heart as it will give you the reasons to build this at your home.

If you need more clarifications on the uploading of the program to the board i recomment to check this video.

That was all about this project, Have a great and happy valentines day, Thanks for reading