Wooden Hexagon Backlit Panels W/Animated LED Strips

Modular backlit wooden hexagon panels with addressable LED strips.

This project is heavily based upon this excellent project by Giovanni Aggiustatutto: https://www.instructables.com/DIY-Wooden-Nanoleaf-Light-Panels/

There were a few things I wanted to change about his design:

• Size: The space I wanted to fill on my wall is pretty large and I felt his panels were too small for my purpose.
• Wiring: As I'll explain later, I think his approach to mounting the LED strips requires too much manual labor to solder each strip segment together. I wanted to simplify this.

Increasing the size ended up requiring quite a few changes to his design - it was a lot more than just making everything bigger.

These are the supplies I used. You could certainly swap for other similar materials.

• Plywood
• Plywood edge banding
• LED strips
• Power supply
• LED strip connectors & harness wires
• Power connectors
• Wire strippers (not strictly necessary but will save a ton of time)
• M5 Brass nuts
• M5 x 10mm bolts
• ESP32 Processor
• Wood screws
• PLA - use whatever you have. Color mostly doesn't matter since the 3D printed parts are hidden. However, I recommend using a dark color PLA for the stabilizers (see terminology) since this helps to keep light from the LEDs from appearing in the gap between panels. I used white for some of my stabilizers and the light leaked through so I ended up having to cover them in black tape as you can see in one of the photos.

To make things in future steps easier I'll explain some terminology I use in this document. See photo for details.

• Panel - the wood hexagon pieces cut from plywood
• Hub - 3d printed hexagons that mount to each panel and have LED strips mounted around the outside
• Bridge - 3d printed rectangles that attach hubs to each other
• Stabilizer - 3d printed rectangles mounted along the intersections of panels to provide additional strength and rigidity and keep the panel edges flush
• Wire harness - collection of wires that connect LED strips on each panel to each other
• Mount - the hub side of the bracket that is used to hang it from the wall. Note that the final mount is a bit shorter than the one shown in this picture.

The order in which you complete these steps doesn't matter much. You could certainly build the hubs, program the controller, and do all the wiring first, then cut the wood panels and assemble everything.

The first picture shows the back of a wood panel with an early prototype of the hub.

I chose to use 1/2 inch maple plywood which I got at my hardware store.

Start by printing the template 3D model. See second picture - the template is yellow and the black hub fits perfectly inside it so you can line everything up on top of the wood panel.

Use the template to trace the outline onto the plywood. Make a few more panels than you plan to use as I guarantee you will make mistakes along the way and ruin at least a couple of panels.

Cut around the outline so each piece is as close to identical as possible. This is not as easy as it sounds. I found out the hard way, a jigsaw is not a precision instrument! After several failed attempts, I enlisted the help of my woodworking buddy, Tom, who has a nifty router that made this easier. Here's what we did:

• I made a rough cut slightly larger than the traced outline of each panel.
• Using double-sided tape, he attached the template to a panel and set the height on his router so that the template acted as a guide for the cutting tool. This was repeated for each panel. See third photo.

This worked beautifully and each panel ended up more or less identically sized. (Thanks, Tom!) Giovanni used a different technique using a miter box that was very clever so you may want to check out his page and see if you can scale it up.

After cutting, the panels looked great but I didn't care for the appearance of the plywood edges. I opted to get wood banding which I adhered to the edges. Search Youtube for "plywood edge banding" to learn how to do this. It's easy and looks great (see fourth photo). I used an edge trimming tool similar to this one which saved a lot of time.

I thought the panels looked fine in their natural color but my wife thought it would be more interesting to have a few different colors. We tried several stains before we were able to narrow it down to just three which I think look great. (Although natural would also have looked good IMHO.)

Print the attached enclosure and cover for the ESP32 controller. This will only fit the specific controller I listed in the parts. Other ESP32 controllers might require a slightly different enclosure. There are plenty of publicly available ESP32 enclosures to choose from.

I won't go into a ton of detail about how to wire up the ESP32 controller or install the WLED software, since this is widely covered elsewhere. Giovanni covers it pretty well on his page or just search for WLED ESP32 setup. There are tons of Youtube videos that explain this in detail far better than I can.

Note that Giovanni takes some extra steps to wire up hidden buttons on the back of one of his panels to the controller. I didn't bother with this so you can ignore those parts of his instructions (unless you want buttons).

Suffice it to say you need to provide power and ground to the controller. Exiting the enclosure, you'll need a 3-wire bundle with +5 on red, gnd on white, and data-out from one of the controller output pins on green. You can choose which data-out pin to use in the WLED software. The wire bundle should terminate in a male connector (it has pins, not holes). Before soldering everything I recommend using alligator clips or something similar to make sure it all works. I also recommend using heat-shrink tubing around solder joints to keep everything isolated and clean.

Most LED strips come with a female connector already attached at one end so you can connect it to your controller and make sure it all works before proceeding which is a good idea and will get you excited about the project.

In Giovanni's design, he has the LED strips attached to the back of the wood panels, facing the wall. At each corner he had to solder short connectors between the three conductors. That's 18 solder points per panel which seems like a lot of work to me.

Since my design is larger, I could make the hub tall enough so that I could mount the strips to the edge of each hub. The strips curve around each edge without having to cut them so there's no need to make all those solder connections.

I recommend getting started by printing two hubs, one bridge, and one stabilizer.

Cut a section of LED strip at a divider so that you have a strip with 27 LEDs on it. This is the right length to go around the outside of the hub.

One corner of the hub has a hole that passes from the center of the hub to the outside. The wires carrying the signal to and from the LED strip will be run through this "tunnel". You can clearly see the red, green, and white input and output wires coming out of the tunnel in the first two pictures.

Look carefully at your LED strips. There are triangular arrows which indicate the direction of signal flow. You'll want to wrap the LEDs around the hub like I did in the photos. If you are looking down at the hub with the flat "bottom" (the part that will touch the wood panel) facing down, then the arrows on the strip should indicate a counter-clockwise direction around the hub. It's important that you do this consistently on every hub. The first photo shows the input wire connecting to the "start" of the LED strip which runs around the hub. The second photo shows the output wire connecting to the "end" of the LED strip.

The LED strips have sticky backing which doesn't adhere well to PLA. Use a thin line of super glue gel to make sure it stays put. Don't use the liquid super glue or you'll end up with your fingers glued to the hubs. Ask me how I know.

Route the bare-wire end of one male and one female 3-wire connector through the tunnel in the hub, and solder one set to the input side of the LED strip and one to the output. Use a female connector for input, and a male connector for output. You'll want to trim the wire bundles with the connectors so they reach from the inside of the hub, through the tunnel, to the outside of the hub. If you leave them at full length you'll have a lot of extra wire to stuff in the small cavity in the middle of the hub. See the fourth and fifth photos as examples of how short I cut mine.

Using the wire bundle with the female connector, the red wire should connect to the +5 point, the green wire should connect to the "din" (data in) point, and the white wire should connect to the gnd point. This is clearly shown in the first two photos.

Repeat the process with the wire bundle with the male connector. You'll note on the output end of the LED strip, the middle solder point is labeled "do" which means data out.

When you are done you should have a hub with LEDs running around the outside and male and female connectors in the middle of the hub. Connect the male connector from your controller to the female connector on your hub and make sure it works. Note that the WLED software needs to know how many LEDs are on the data path - to test a single hub, set it to 27 since that's the number of LEDs on each hub.

Now build a second hub identically to the first. Connect the output from the first hub to the input of the second hub. In the WLED software, change the number of LEDs to 54 (27 * 2), and confirm that both hubs now work.

Repeat this process until you have as many hubs as you plan to use in your design. I'll talk about building the wire harnesses that go between hubs later - you really only need to test each hub individually at this point.

You can also test-fit a bridge and stabilizer between two hubs as shown in the sixth photo. I'll explain how everything connects up in a later section.

In the last photo you can see a bunch of finished hubs before I mounted them to the panels.

Let's talk harnesses. This is the bundle of wires that carry the power and data signal from one hub to the next. You'll need multiple of these - one for each panel in your design.

The simplest design by far is shown in the first diagram. A 3-wire female connector connected directly to a 3-wire male connector. Make it the right length so it can reach from the center of one hub to the center of the next and you are done.

There's a problem with this design. The voltage and current that enters the circuit at the first LED will gradually be depleted as it makes its way to each LED in the first panel, then each LED in the second panel, and so on. If you have enough panels and LEDs, the power drop can be substantial and cause problems. Search for LED strip voltage injection for a more detailed description of the problem.

The workaround is to inject power at various points along your circuit.

I probably didn't need to do this because my design only has 7 panels (27 * 7 = 189 LEDs) but I decided to take a principled approach and make a lot of extra work for myself. I love the smell of solder rosin in the morning!

The second diagram shows how I accomplished this with my harnesses. Basically, the power coming into each hub is split. One red/white (+5/gnd) pair goes to that hub's LED strip, the other pair goes to the hub output connector which feeds the next hub. So each hub's LED strip gets fresh power from the source - the hubs are effectively wired in parallel. The green data wire still needs to go through every single LED so that is still routed serially rather than in parallel.

There are several photos of the harness that try to show how it works. It's pretty simple really, just a lot of wire stripping, soldering, and heat-shrinking. If this seems like too much work or is too complicated you should probably stick with the simple harness in the first diagram.

Ok. If you've made it this far then you have finished wood panels, an equal number of hubs, bridges, stabilizers, and harnesses. You've tested the whole circuit on your work bench using the controller. Time to put it together!

Print a spare hub that has no LEDs around the outside, place it inside the template, and use this to locate where the screw holes should go on the panels. Start by attaching a hub to each wood panel. Use extreme caution with the screws - it's very easy to over-torque them and punch right through the hub plastic or use too-long screws and penetrate the front of the panel. I recommend pre-drilling small pilot holes in the panels to avoid splitting the wood.

Once you have a hub attached to each panel, layout your panels according to your design. You'll need to attach one bridge between each hub. Heat-insert M5 brass nuts into the necessary holes on each hub using your soldering iron. This video explains how to do this. Use the M5 x 10mm bolts to attach the bridge between the hubs.

Once that's done, slide a stabilizer under each bridge and insert more M5 brass nuts where appropriate. Attach these to the bridges using M5 x 10mm bolts. Finally, use wood screws to attach these to the wood panels using the same precautions previously stated when attaching the hubs to the panels. Your design should be pretty rock solid at this point. Almost done!

Note: I recommend using a dark color PLA for the stabilizers since these help to keep light from the LEDs from appearing in the gap between panels. I used white for some of mine and the light leaked through so I ended up having to cover them in black tape as you can see in one of the photos.

The wall mounts are pretty self-explanatory. The hub side is attached using M5 bolts and heat-inserted brass nuts. The wall side should be sunk into studs or anchors.