What's on the bench? Floodlight Project

Well there are always too many projects! All in different states of done. Two that are screaming for my attention lately are the Floodlight and MeArm projects. The Floodlight is an iteration of a product we already sell, the BigClive Floodlight PCB. Clive's PCB is rock solid, sells well - particularly to the French and is well loved. So why mess with it? It's a great board but it can only take one kind of LED, most people have a stash of LEDs and would like to use them in whatever project comes their way, some people even have favourite LEDs. So I tweaked the LED footprint and added pads for surface mount as well as holes for your standard common all garden LEDs to compliment the Superflux LED holes on Clive's version. Discussing this with Clive last night he pointed out that it was very much like the LED footprint on another PCB he'd done. So turns out I nicked that idea too. Anyway I did make it look pretty with a lovely red solder mask.

There are a couple more "improvements" too. The board is double sided so now no need for jumpers and the mounting holes are located sensibly in the corners. They're also connected to the copper pour on the top layer so you can pull away some heat if you need to by using metal fixings. Since caring is sharing and I'm all about the Open Source, the files are on Github already if you want to fire up Kicad and take a look.

The board essentially has three channels, used mostly for red, green and blue LEDs, but I was thinking of using two with IR LEDs and the final channel for Red LEDs to use in our external floodlight for an area that will be covered by a PiNoir camera. The red LEDs will warn potential intruders that they've been spotted, frankly I'd rather they push off than carry on snooping around on the flat roof!

It's still only a prototype but if you fancy taking a look at a board for yourself I've put them up on the site

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