Beautiful Burned Wood LED Wall Art

For those of us who love the look of LED art, we’re currently living in something of a utopia. Individually-addressable RGB LEDs and microcontroller development boards are incredibly affordable, and are easy enough to use that just about any maker can take advantage of them. Slap those LEDs on whatever you like, connect up a few wires, and load up an open source LED control library, and you’ll be in business. If you want some more detail on how exactly to do that and some stellar inspiration, check out Frugha’s Instructables tutorial that explains how they built this beautiful burn wood LED wall art.

Just take one look at this piece of art and you’ll see why it stands out — it looks phenomenal. The burned wood planks perfectly encapsulate the rustic barn house aesthetic that is all the rage right now, and the colorful LEDs add a pleasant modern glow. The electronic components necessary to construct a piece of art like this should cost less than $20, and you can probably find the wood you need in the scrap cut-offs bin at your local hardware store. You can exercise your own sense of creativity as you assemble the wood planks. Simply glue them together in a haphazard pattern, and then attach some standard hanger mounts to the back. Then go to town with a torch to char the inside ends of the planks. You can optionally add a few coats of oil or stain if you’d like.

The light for this project comes from a strip of WS2812B individually-addressable RGB LEDs. Those are controlled by an ESP8266-based NodeMCU V2 board. That board can connect to your WiFi network, which gives you the ability to control the LED effects remotely from your smartphone or a computer. Those LEDs draw a lot of current, so you’ll need an external power supply. It should be 5V and at least a few amps — generally speaking, you can assume each LED will draw a maximum of 60mA. The NodeMCU board can accept 5V, but outputs logic at 3.3V. You’ll use a logic level shifter to push that back up to the 5V needed for the LED strip’s data line. If you’re using a lot of LEDs, you’ll want to distribute the power connections across multiple points on the strip to account for voltage drop. A simple capacitor filters the power in case there are any potentially damaging voltage spikes. Even if this particular design doesn’t fit your décor, you can follow the same basic steps to build a piece that does.