Arduino + PWM Shield = Easy LED Fading

I'm lazy! Why make my own circuit to control the individual steps fading in and out on the automatic stair lighting when I can use a pre-designed circuit board.

The best way I've found of fading LED strip lights is with Pulse Width Modulation. Arduinos can do this (and have a few pin headers dedicated to PWM), but I'm going to have at least 10 stairs and will run out of PWM connectors on a standard Arduino.

An Arduino Starter Kit from oomlout costs £40.50 and includes an Arduino Uno, breadboard, pre-made jumper wires and other bits and bobs needed to get prototyping.

The great thing about Arduinos is you can connect shields to their pin outs to quickly and easily add extra functionality. There are almost 300 known shields available (a fully searchable list is available at http://shieldlist.org).


If I use a PWM control shield from Practical Maker then it gives me 32 PWM outputs, which are more than enough!

A pre-assembled shield costs $36.75 from the US, but a naked PCB only costs $11.25. If the other components can be sourced from the UK then this would be a lot more affordable.

Simple and easy, and then just the hard bit of coding and wiring up the LED strips!