I finally got around to upgrading my FW3A to a complete MELD build with RGB and UV:
This one was a bit of a challenge because the driver area is so compact. It was made doable because I typically dislike using direct drive, so the first thing I did was to remove the big FET. That left me enough room to place a new microcontroller (PIC16F1575) on a breakout board, and 4 additional MEL7135 regulators:
The LED placement on a light this compact wasn’t much easier - the only place I could fit the additional parts (XQE color and Lux UV 405nm) was off to the side between two of the white emitters. To do this I made a board on hand-cut blank flex PCB material:
And soldered the LEDs in place:
In this location there’s just enough space to fit inside of the optics post:
And the new LED setup looks like this with wiring added. The new LED board is attached with two-sided thermal tape:
I flashed the standard MELD UI onto the microcontroller and wired everything up. The wires for the color channels are 34AWG so there’s enough space to scrunch up enough length to have them wired before the driver is pushed into place.
Since the colors are just firing into the back of the optic, the beam pattern looks pretty crazy:
But on the plus side it makes lava lamp mode look pretty cool:
Since the UV is actually fairly long-wavelength near-UV at 405nm it comes through the plastic optic just fine:
And with all channels on low you can just barely make out the bare emitters under there:

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