Electronics LED fan wiring and control of LED's - Mini Guide (post #13)

added pics

Allright, here's the PICs that I promised. I added text directly to the pics for clarification and have added 2 untouched pics if you need more detail or something just to look at.


PIC A Shot of wiring to Junction box. Wires that connect on the top side of picture are all LED's including LED FAN lights only. Wires on the Bottom Side are +12v and GND as well as separations to 2 Rocker Switches located in front panel.




PIC B An Idea of the cable chaos (not all cables are shown nor connected at this point)




PIC C Further Clarification of PIC B but with added text and slightly different angle/framing




PIC D Clarification of PIC A with added text for optimal layout



PIC E Close up of BigNG and most cables connecting to it (2 digital Temp sensors +USB+4 pin Molex). All in All, there will be 4 fans in the case: 2*120 that are wired together for 120.2 rad located at top of case, 1*120 for 120.1 rad located in Front Panel, and last the LED FAN. Now that I think about it, there will ONLY BE 2 FAN GROUPS CONNECTED TO BIGNG (all RAD FANS), so the picture is slightly wrong. I believe I'll connect the LED FAN to the Sensorbus.




PIC F SENSORBUS picture showing detail of connections. This will have 1 fan connected and it will be LED FAN. other connectors include the POWER SW from Front Panel, POWER SW to Mobo (acts as emergency shut off), BigNG connector, and 2 Analog Temp Sensors.




Is that enough to work with or should I try and draw up a diagram or something? Or do you need pictures of something else?

Thanks!

 

You've done alot of sleeving and wiring, looks pretty cool. I can't really tell if anything is wired incorrectly though, sorry.
Here's an example of how i would draw a quick circuit diagram of how i think you want the fans wired:

If i'm right and you mean for things to be wired this way, then you'd want to over each connection one by one to make sure they all agree with the circuit diagram.
If you have things planned differently to my circuit, then you should draw it up to show us what you have planned.
I might be wrong, but i've got a feeling the junction box wiring might the cause of the trouble... once you've made a diagram you can follow, then you can check it all out

 

Hey logan'srun,
first off, nice guide. I like the pics and all the details in your steps. I want to do something like this as well (I have a little trouble though, since my led fan has clear cables not black and red so I don't know which is ground! ...any help on how to test for ground appreciated!) I'm amazed at all your sleeving... it's looking good! That must have been a lot of work.

While I know little of electronics, and haven't done this myself, I'd like to see if I can help. From your troubleshooting, it sounds like the problem is that both the fan and leds light up when power is applied. (well, and the smoke!) If I understand you correctly, the fans should be on, but the leds off. I think you should eliminate the variables (As you started to in step 2)... When connected direct to power, can you still control the leds when just power is applied to the fan? Does the switch turn the leds on and off? I was thinking you may have a short between the ground wire connecting the led's switch and the ground to the fans. However, if this is the case, wouldn't the problem be just the lights not being turned off, and no shorts, sparks, or smoke?

Have you tried it with just the junction box, and not the bigng/sensors? Can you turn everything on/off with no problems?

Can you provide a diagram of the terminal strip/junction box? I don't understand fully how you have everything wired up, and there may be something funky going on there.

 

Well, to start off with, I'm only using 1 LED fan since I decided that it would be too much light with all the others, plus I had laready built several LED arrays that are included in the chassi.

regarding the wiring diagram of the junction box, I don't know how I could be any clearer than what's in the picture posted earlier with details to every wire. I'll try and draw one up now and see if it helps you.

Also, I have the +12v wires going to the rocker switches, not the grounds. I'm not sure if that makes any difference as it was explained to me here and in the diagram provided they also used the +12v line. So that's what I did.

I hope you don't mind, but I numbered your questions so it would be easier to answer.

1. NO
2. YES, but only if the fan molex is not connected
3. ME TOO actually.
4. DON'T KNOW enough about electroniccs to be able to identify what's a major problem and what's a wiring problem. It seems to me that with the FAN MOLEX connected at the same time as the junction box, that the fan receives to much power which I'm thinking now is the cause of the problem. If the fan is not connected, I can control the lights completely. With fan connected, I cannot control the lights as the lights are already on and all that I'm doing is sending more +12v current to the fan causing it to short/smoke somewhere. This was evident by the connection to the BigNg as the BigNg began to smoke (via the small LED's) when I flipped the current to power the lights while the fan was plugged into the BigNg.
5. YES, can control the lights of everything in the case, including FAN, but not when fan molex is plugged in.
6. YES.

I'll work now on a quick diagram, but I'm really thinking that it has something to do with the fan itself that either I botched the soldering somewhere and it's making a connection anyway, or ? I just unplugged everything again except for the FAN and the J.B. and the FAN LIGHTS are always on when the molex is plugged in. I don't know what's different now from before as the fan that I'm using is the same one from the pictures in teh guide, and you see everything I do there. And I was able to control the fan and the lights separately. But what has me thinking was the issue and a problem I would never have seen during the tests is this: I had both wires controlling the LED's connected to the Rocker Switch during the test, so weren't they acting as the break? That would mean that the power was always present to LED's and I needed to break the current from the LED's themselves, and by wiring them to the junction box, I'm not providing the break that I should???


EDIT

Here's the diagram




here's a close up of the final wiring of the fan, all other wiring is in the guide pictures posted earlier.




EDIT 2 Now that I'm going over it again, I think I reconnected the small black wire to the mainboard in the pic above, could that be the problem? I don't remember why I did that, but in the original diagram it called for that wire to be cut , should that have been connected to something else, like the negative lead from the LED's? I have the sinking suscpicion that it's the culprit. . . If you look at the pic, you see 2 GNDs connected to the mainboard. . .

 

That negative wire was supposed to be cut, so instead of the leds getting power together with the fan, they are getting power through a switch.

Now i think your trouble may be coming from connecting the fan's +ve to +12v and the bigng output at the same time? I'm only guessing though, i could be way off here...

I can now see that your junction box wiring plan is fine, but if i saw a wiring diagram, just like that, for the whole setup, then i'd know exactly what's going on! Sorry to be a pain, but i'm much better with pictures than words, sorta like homer

 

hmm, I just cut that small wire and there was no change. LED lights were on when molex was connected. I honestly believe it's a small mistake with the fan somewhere, I just don't know where.
The connecting of the GND wires makes sense, but something is missing concerning the main connecting point in the last pic above, it feels like I've missed an important juncture. .


EDIT 23:29 OK, I just did the procedure on a new fan, and I think I've made a discovery. I can plug the fan in, and it works with no lights. If I connect the GND wire to (whatever really) the Junction Box or even straight to a GND Molex, I get lights. So why is that? When connected to the J.B., there was no current to the strip since the rockers weren't thrown, yet the LED lights were on.
I powered off the system, and left the wire loose and turned back on the PSU. Fan worked but no lights, so I tried just touching the GND of a molex and I had lights. I did this several times while the fan was on.
The only thing I didn't try was to see if I got lights (through the rocker switches) without the FAN Molex being connected, but with the GND connected to the J.B.
So perhaps the question is, how do I break the connection to turn off and on the lights, because it seems to me now that the solution is halfway there. ..

 

Ahh, this is probably too simple to be the answer, but i think all you have to do is make sure that the gnd for the fan's leds goes through the led switch, then to the gnd of the junction box. But if you don't have the switch in the right spot now, then where is it

! Do you have the led switch connecting the led gnd's to 12v That would be why you were making smoke!!!

 

I'm confused by your first statement, what do you mean by that? The work that I did is laid out in the mini-guide I posted earlier in this thread, so I followed that step by step. I have the GND of the LED's all connected together and leading to 1 wire only (that was my mistake earlier I believe, which was I had continued a lead off the circuit board and had assumed that was a +12v for some reason. That would account for your second statement which is a . I must have inhaled too much solder smoke that day), which is the GND wire only.

Can you define more what you mean by the gnd for the fan's leds goes through the led switch, then to the gnd of the junction box? Because like I stated earlier, I know this time I've followed the steps exactly and I haven't missed anything. I think the issue is that if the GND is connected to the JB then it's getting the gnd that it needs and thus completes the circuit, regardless of the rocker being on/off (the rocker is wired up with +12v, not the GND, so the GND is present already in the JB, right? Or am I wrong on that???). Does this mean I would need to wire the LED fan to a separate switch all on it's own? IS that the answer, or is there something we've missed on the board layout?

 

I think i'm getting confused as i haven't seen the complete circuit together in a diagram, sorry!

 

ok, well I hope this is what you mean, because I've never done diagrams before and I'm basing mine off of your simplified version you posted in post#22.

For a complete view of the junction box refer to post #24, otherwise I'm hoping that you understand everything in the picture.




Is this what you mean by a circuit diagram?

I still feel that something is missing from the fan wiring because if the fan is connected, no lights are on, but once the GND is connected to GND, the lights come on, regardless if a switch is on or off. I've experimented with the GND wire and connected it to a switch by itself, but the lights were not controllable. I connected the GND to the J.B, and the lights were always ON regardless if the switch was on/off. If the GND was connected straight to a GND in a molex, the lights are ON.
This has me thinking that the circuit has only been separated from LED Fan itself, but not separated enough to be controllable other than me pulling the wire in and out of a Molex. I'm not making the connection on the next step because my idea would be to connect the GND to a Molex, and then to a switch, but isn't that being done already with the Rocker/Junctionbox? I don't want to add another switch to the case, and would like to tie it in to the existing switches already.

What are we missing?

 

It's more like a basic layout, but it'll do i think...

It seems like you have the rocker switches connecting +12v to +12v, and gnd to gnd. There's no need for these two rocker switches.

All you need is the one switch breaking the gnd wire as is shown in my diagram:


I think you say that you have tried controlling the lights like this, but they were always on no matter where the switch was. If the fan led is still wired the way it was when you first did the mod, then the leds would be controllable, just like they were then, with a switch wired like in my diagram.

 

I really appreciate the help you're giving me and the others from this forum, and I hope that I'm not too frustrating.

I need to reiterate a point for clarification.

The wiring to the rocker switches are as followed (also outlined in post #24)

1) the junction strip is split into 2 separate strips so that I can have two switches. Looking closely at the diagram I provided shows the split. It's done so I can have different lighting effects in the case.

2) The rocker switches are done as follows: +12v wire goes to switch 1 and a +12v wire goes to switch 2 (corresponding to the different areas on the strip) while 2 separate +12v lines connect the rockers to a molex. Thus enabling the 'break in the circuit' allowing me to control the lights.

3) There are no GND wires to the switches as I have opted to use the +12v line instead (again pointed out earlier in my link to another thread).

4) I've come to the conclusion that I need to either rewire the whole strip and use the GND wires instead to my switches so that I can tie in the LED fan, or else add a new switch to the case itself. I feel that the problem stems from before the Fan Wiring was wrong and I had mistakenly drawn a +12v line from the fan as well which allowed me to control the lights (thinking that my wiring was wrong somewhere else)
but once I re-did a new fan with the proper wiring, I see that I have very little choice as I need to bring the GND to both the JB and the Switch (this point exactly is where I've been wrong). Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's the solution huh? That's where the problem has been all along.

 

I think i'm starting to make sense of it all now

On your junction box you have a positive & a gnd wire for the led fan, but in your diagram and even my version of your diagram, there is only the gnd wire that you modded on to control the leds, which is going to the junction box.

I think if you disconnect the led fan positive wire from the junction box, so that the fan is only getting power from the sensorbus, then all will work as it's supposed to, i think... i guess the exception would be that at low fan speeds the led wouldn't be very bright, but that's another mod! Getting around that would mean controlling the leds via thier +ve lead instead of the -ve

 

Yes, that statement is correct, I only have a gnd wire going to the JB. With the original fan I realized that I had made a mistake and had brought both the +12v and GND to the J.B. when in the guide it called for me to clip that wire. So that means that the diagram for the JB is WRONG (although it was right at the time I did it ) and needs to have the +12v to the fan eliminated from the diagram.

That is what I did in POST 26 when wrote that I had re-wired a whole new fan. That fan is now properly wired and that is the only fan I'm referring to. But I think that you're right in your diagram that I need to bring the LED GND to a switch, and then the GND back to the JB, and not vice versa like I have tried. Just connecting the GND to the J.B creates no break in the relay, just a complete circuit. It's also what you pointed out in POST 27 (and what's been some of the issue is I've been to lazy to redo all the wiring to my J.B. since that took 5-6hrs to get perfect, plus it's wired with the +12v line as the break in the relay, and doing it the other way means redoing all of that work).

I feel that my last recourse is to try and do what you pointed out in POST 31 and see if that's the answer. The LED Fan gets power from the fan connector itself, so it makes sense and is perhaps easier to accomplish with the GND wire as the break. Why has this been so hard to get through my head. . . .

EDIT After getting home from work, taking care of the family and putting the young one to bed, I managed to get down in the cellar for a couple hours. I reversed all the wiring so that I know had
+12v MOLEX--> J.B ---> GND ---> Rocker Switch ----> J.B (I'm sure you get the idea). Anyway, before I proceeded, I tested the J.B by itself, all lights worked (excluding the fan of course). So I then proceeded to bring the LED GND to the Rocker Switch itself. Before finalizing the Pin attachment with the crimping tongs, I tested the set up again ------> SUCCESS!! Long story short, I had to re-sleeve all the rocker switch wiring and include the LED GND direct to Rocker Switch # 2 for the fan lights to work.

Moral of story: Check everything 8 times before sleeving.


Big thanks for all the help and patience, I know it wasn't easy

 

Alright! Congratulations on getting it to work and your perservence. Props to mvagusta for sticking with it as well!
Just to let you guys know, I created my first successful test of led on/off with the fans running from your guide and mvagusta's help. Now I just have to get some new small wire and heatshrink and wire it up for real. (and or wire the second fan in series with it!

I think the ground breaking at the switch is key!

 

That's awesome to hear!!

And definitely thanks to mvgusta for his insights!

 

Good to read it's all working I didn't exactly work alone though, i couldn't have done it without Relix.