Current hw rev: 2.1
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YULC is your future-proof perfect mate for powering your lightings at 5, 12 or 24V. Thanks to its compact form factor, it can be placed almost everywhere, it features a lot of protections to ensure safety for both the charger and the strips, and in the meanwhile, can provide a lot of juice to feed very power-hungry lights setup.
It also boasts an handy built-in buck regulator that from a maximum of 24V ensures safe 5V or 12V to your output. This mean that is also possible to use 18,19,...,24V external power supply (USB-C or barrel jack) taking advantage of their higher total power output and converting them to 5V or 12V increasing the output current.
Furthermore, on the back of the board there is a powerful ESP32-S3, directly programmable from the USB-C, that allows you to manage even more complex effects and to run heavy tasks.
So, in few words, YULC consists in a full-featured board that can replace a lot of wiring messes, optimizing space and debug time in a reliable way.
Here you can have a look to how the power path works:
There are two power stages. The main one for the led stips and one dedicated to the ESP32
Powering all the logic and the ESP32-S3 with a dedicated secondary power stage without relying on the main one ensures that in case of a blowing fuse, everyhitng will still work as expected. So replacing the fuse on-the-fly will be the only thing you'll need to be again ready to go.
- This is the main jumper that you have to select before anything else and before powering the board. If you join the "EXT" pins, YULC will be powered through the barrel jack power supply, not through the USB-C. So you can use a power supply up to 24V and then decide if you want to buck it to 5V or 12V or use it directly to the output bypassing the buck converter. With this selection, you are also able to safely program YULC through the USB-C while powering everything from the external power supply thanks to a back-to-back mosfet configuration. To do that you have to select 5V from the PD selection voltage (2). There will also be those 5V on the board but they won't power anything (To prove that just disconnect the barrel jack power supply and the board will be turned off). Instead, if you select "USB" pins, everything will be powered from the USB-C according to the voltage selected. As before, you can choose to buck the voltage to 12 or 5V or use it directly.
Caution
When selecting "USB", do not also connect the barrel jack!.
- USB-C PD Voltage selection. Note that these voltages are the one you are asking for to the charger, not the ones you'll surely have on the board. Selecting 20V, if the charger can provide them, the negotiation will end successfully, mosfets will let current flow and everything will be powered on. But if the charger is not able to do that, the negotiation will fail and the board will stay off. To help you debug that, the leds "OK" or "BAD" will lights up according to the negotiation result. Pay attention to the chargers you want to use. It should have a label with the list of voltages it can provide, so be sure to ask for that supported voltages, otherwise the negotiation will fail. Also consider the amount of power you need for your led strips and the power the charger can give. Chargers with the USB-A output will not work, even selecting 5V on YULC. Only Type-C Power Delivery chargers are compatible
Important
Eg. If you have 5V strips like WS2812b and you want 6A at the output (so 30W), be sure to ask the for a voltage/current combo the charger can offer that can give those 30W and than buck it to 5V through the converter to have the current you want at the output.
Important
Be sure to select the closest combination of power and input voltage to what you need. If you need the buck IC to regulate at 5V, an input voltage of 9V or 12V will be better than a 24V from the heating point of view. The voltage difference (Vin - Vout) is smaller, so the inductor is "less stressed" -> less ripple current -> less heat. So you need the best trade-off with a quite close input voltage and enough power for your application.
- This is the buck converter output regulation. Populate horizontally the pairs of pins according to the voltage you want to have at the output. If your input is lower or same as the output, just do not use the buck converter and route it directly but keep it populated even if you don't use it. The buck IC will automatically enter in an energy save mode when the load is really small or even is not present. The same voltage will be shared across the two channels You can source up to 20A from the IC.
Important
With high watts at the output the board's temperature will increase, so please always use the given heatsinks (both for the IC and the inductor) and the 5V fan to be on the safe side.
- These two fuse holders are not one for channel as it could seem. The two channels share the same fuse. But there are two fuses because you have to select only one at a time according to what output you need. If you need the buck converter you have to populate the "REGULAT. OUT" fuse. Otherwise, if you want the input voltage routed directly to the output, populate the "DIRECT OUT" one. These holders are compatible with both the standard automotive blade fuses and the mini blase fuses, but for higher currents the standard blade fuse is suggested thanks to a better contact with the holder's metal
Caution
Never populate both of them at the same time, it will short the regulator IC.
-
YULC's has 10 output terminals, 5 for each channel: 2x Positive terminal, 2x GND terminal, 1x Data terminal.
Each terminal can handle up to 15A, so it's heavily suggested to use both the pairs of the positive terminal and negative terminal, to decrease the overall resistance and to inject power easier later in the strips. Each channel is equipped with a level shifer to its data output and a high side power N-mosfet, in order to save a lot of power for longer strips in the idle state. These mosfets can also be used to control simpler strips through PWM, so you can easily control different combinations of type of strips using both the channels. Plase attach the given heatinsks to them to keep them cool when switching high currents -
YULC exposes also some pins through breadboard-friendly headers. You can use these to connect buttons/microhpones/potentiometers but you can also increase the number of output channels but consider that they don't have level shifters and that you should take the power from the dedicated output terminals
GPIO Header:
| Pin | Function |
|---|---|
| GPIO 6 | IO |
| GPIO 5 | IO |
| GPIO 4 | IO |
| GPIO 38 | IO |
| GPIO 37 | IO |
| GPIO 36 | IO |
| 3V | Power |
| GND | Ground |
| GPIO 44 | TX |
| GPIO 43 | RX |
Used GPIO:
| Pin | Function |
|---|---|
| GPIO 0 (DO) | Boot/User Button |
| GPIO 1 (DO) | Led Data 1 |
| GPIO 2 (DO) | Led Data 2 |
| GPIO 47 (DO) | Mosfet 1 |
| GPIO 21 (DO) | Mosfet 2 |
| GPIO 7 (AI) | Fuse sense |
According to your type of setup, you'll want to set YULC and strips to be powered in the the best way possibile. Follow this steps to determine all the jumpers selection you need according to how they work:
Warning
Be sure to power YULC only after you've set everything up, do not change PD and buck output voltages on the fly, neither the first jumper
Only after you are done with jumpers and fuse selections you can mount the 3D printed enclosure, because once it's mounted, you'll have limited access to them.
- YULC with WLED
- ...
Wled for YULC is a manually compiled build, based on the v0.15.0-b5 "Kosen". It features 2 usermods: Audio Reactive and MultiRelay.
AUDIO REACTIVE
Thanks to the powerful ESP32-S3, you can really take adavantage of this integration while driving complex effects on really long strip. Yuo have multiple pins on the exposed header that you can use to read an I2S microphone.
MULTI RELAY
Natively WLED only support one pin (usually connected to a relay) to physically turn on and off the light strips. While you can always use one of the exposed pins to wire an external relay, the built-in hardware already allows you to drive the two channels independently and each with its own power mosfet to toggle the strips. And thanks to this usermod, you can fully take advantage of it. This is valid if you want to connect two addressable strips, but, for example, if you want to connect one digital strip and an anlog one, WLED already manage this without any external software. You would only need to set one mosfet as the main relay, and the other one as a PWM driving signal. YULC offers a great versatility from this point of view.
So, to configure two digital strip go to Config -> LED Preferences and set everything up like the following picture with your own strips type and lengths. Also check "Make a segment for each output"
Now go back to Config -> Usermods and, again, follow the picture, then save. This usermod has 4 pre-defined relays, but you only need the first two. Pin 47 is linked to Channel 1 (DATA 1 on the PCB) and pin 21 to Channel 2. Check also "External" on both, so we can control these relays through the dedicated APIs.
//Switching on the mosfet #0 to power the first segment/strip
curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d ''{"MultiRelay":{"relay":0,"on":true}}'' "http://your-ip-address/json"
//Turning on "software" the segment with ID #0
curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d ''{"seg":[{"id":0,"on":true}]}'' "http://your-ip-address/json/state"
When switching on you'll want to physically turn on the strip before turning on via software. Instead, when switching off, it would be better to reverse the sequence. Basically there should not be data signals to led strips while they are physically disconnected from the power supply.
If you are an Home Assistant user, you can easily integrate these controls as light entities using some shell commands:
shell_command:
strip_1_on: 'curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d ''{"seg":[{"id":0,"on":true}]}'' "http://your-ip-address/json/state"'
strip_1_mos_on: 'curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d ''{"MultiRelay":{"relay":0,"on":true}}'' "http://your-ip-address/json"'
strip_1_off: 'curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d ''{"seg":[{"id":0,"on":false}]}'' "http://your-ip-address/json/state"'
strip_1_mos_off: 'curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d ''{"MultiRelay":{"relay":0,"on":false}}'' "http://your-ip-address/json"'
strip_2_on: 'curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d ''{"seg":[{"id":1,"on":true}]}'' "http://your-ip-address/json/state"'
strip_2_mos_on: 'curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d ''{"MultiRelay":{"relay":1,"on":true}}'' "http://your-ip-address/json"'
strip_2_off: 'curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d ''{"seg":[{"id":1,"on":false}]}'' "http://your-ip-address/json/state"'
strip_2_mos_off: 'curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d ''{"MultiRelay":{"relay":1,"on":false}}'' "http://your-ip-address/json"'
light:
- platform: template
lights:
strip_1:
turn_on:
- service: shell_command.strip_1_mos_on
- service: shell_command.strip_1_on
turn_off:
- service: shell_command.strip_1_off
- service: shell_command.strip_1_mos_off
strip_2:
turn_on:
- service: shell_command.strip_2_mos_on
- service: shell_command.strip_2_on
turn_off:
- service: shell_command.strip_2_off
- service: shell_command.strip_2_mos_offNow you have two completely separated strips from every point of view.
