Some dancing LEDs to enlighten your music experience.

A little while ago, at the beginning of the iPod era, a friend of mine bought an iPod including an i-Station. The i-Station looked pretty cool with the two UV LEDs illuminating the iPod when it was plugged in. However, It would look much nicer to integrate some LEDs which will respond to the music.  This can easily be realized with the well-known LM3915 VU meter IC.

Materials used
- 14 UV LEDs
- 16 orange LEDs
- 24 green LEDs
- 4x LM3915
- Some resistors, capacitors, diodes, transistors.
- Some wire
- Hot glue
- 4x pcb

Building
First of all I had to open the i-Station to see if there would be enough space inside to fit all the LEDs, wires and pcb’s. After a close inspection I came to the conclusion that it could be possible to squeeze in all the electronics. Because this i-Station could also operate on batteries, I had to cut away the battery holders on each side to create extra space.

The LEDs pattern was thought of at the very moment I started to mod this device. There is no particular reason why I have chosen this pattern. It looked cool then, and it still does now I think.  After carefully drilling the holes it was time to glue in the LEDs.

It turned out to be quite a problem to find a good spot to get the audio signal from the original pcb. Because my schematic was designed to receive a signal at line-level, I couldn’t just connect the line-in lead to one of the speakers. Then I saw that the subwoofer (big square block in the middle) besides a white wire, also two power leads had going into it. Therefore it must be an active subwoofer and the white wire had to be the audio signal for the amplifier. For testing purposes I build the circuit on a bread board and used the audio signal from the i-Station to see if it would work. It did, this problem solved!

Initially I made only two pcb’s to drive the 40 LEDs from the two LED bars. That is 20 LEDs per driver pcb. The two half arcs in the middle were meant to be on continuously. Later I changed my mind and decided the half arcs were also to be controlled by a driver. This is why two drivers are build on etched pcb’s and the other two, due to lack of time, on prototype board.

After the pcb’s were made, everything could be wired and glued into place. In the pictures can be seen how everything found its place inside the i-Station.

Photos
The schematic I used as the LEDs driver can be seen in one of the pictures.

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