Any Electrical Engineers?

Alright so I have an idea.

I have some LED Accent lighting in my car. They are basically these adhesive LED light strips, with two wires (+ and -) coming out of it. Right now, I have them spliced into zones, and each zone is terminated with a cigarette lighter plug. I have four of those, which are plugged into a switchbox that I bought at Autozone, which has a switch for each plug. So all I need to do is flip a switch to turn on a zone.

While this is awesome and works great, I can't let things lie. Here is what I would like to do.

Build a device that has 2 ports. One to plug into USB, and one to plug into a car outlet for power. On that, it will have X amount of little screw\clamps (kind of like on the back of a speaker) so that wires can be attached to it.

Possibility one: from there, it plugs into a raspberry pi. This raspberry pi has some sort of interaction software on it that I will write, and it will also have a webserver that will allow for interaction with the software. I will have this, and my iPad connected to the same mobile hotspot. Safari will be opened, and the iPad will be attached to a mount. Low and behold, I can turn my zones on and off with my iPad.

Possibility two: the device is plugged into a laptop, which is on a mount (similar to police cars) running Windows in the front seat.

Does anybody have any advice, or perhaps some literature for me to read on the subject?

Thanks!

 

Both options are possible but I would recommend #1. Police cars have larger than usual alternators to power laptops and the other equipment they carry, and their laptops have specialist powerpacks to run on 12V. A Raspberry Pi (or similar) can easily be run on 12v, and might even be 12v natively. It also has a much lower power consumption, and with a laptop you would need a conversion board like the Pi anyway to connect the LEDs to.

Also, you could set up the Pi to make nice patterns as well!

 

Sounds like you have everything covered :confused With the led's don't do the math or read the literature just attach a pot then turn it up until it reaches it's maximum brightness and doesn't get too hot to work out the resistor needed, ignore if they're already fitted.

To connect to computer you need something like an arduino nano.

http://www.coolcomponents.co.uk/catalog/arduino-nano-p-261.html

It has 14 digital output pins which can be used to turn stuff on and off, the problem is they only output 40ma@5v so you can't drive the lights directly you'll have to use either a 5v relay that switches below 40ma@5v switching a 12v switch or a semi conductor such as a power mosfet, the power mosfet will have to have a low gate threshold voltage to be sure it's fully on at 5v 'they usually only start turning on at 5v and saturate at 12-15V 'fully on' so I would probably use a transistor with an output large enough to drive your lights.

The nano will need a constant power supply and a cable connection to reprogram, there's probably something similar with a bluetooth connection to control wirelessly but I'm not familiar with it.

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