Add RGB Lighting to Your PC Fans for Cool Animated Effects

RGB LEDs and gaming PCs go together like peanut butter and jelly. I’m not exactly sure why that’s the case, but the evidence in undeniable. It’s actually kind of difficult to purchase components for gaming PCs that aren’t covered in colorful LEDs. PC cooling fans are definitely included in that. But if your fans don’t have LEDs or if you want something a bit more custom than the standard fare, Dave, of the Dave’s Garage YouTube channel, has a great video that will walk you through how to build your own RGB LED PC fans with cool animated effects.

The most basic kind of RGB LED is essentially just three or four single-color LEDs (depending on whether white is included) housed within a single package. They typically either share an anode or cathode, and the other anodes or cathodes are used to activate each individual LED as needed. These days, however, we have individually-addressable RGB LEDs like the popular WS2812B. These contain the same three or four LEDs, but also have a basic IC in the package which makes them very easy to control. They have connections for positive power, negative power, and data. All you have to do is send a signal on the data line telling the WS2812B how brightly you want to illuminate each of the built-in LEDs.

This project utilizes those WS2812B LEDs, which will be controlled by an ESP32 board that has an integrated OLED display. You can use these LEDs with a variety of fan types, but they work best with fans made from translucent or at least white plastic. That’s because the LEDs will be shining light from the outside in, through the plastic. You can use a single development board to control a whole lot of LEDs, so long as power is distributed properly — one power connection for each fan should be plenty. That power can come directly from a spare rail on your PC’s power supply. After the hardware is all setup, you can use a variety of LED effects libraries to create animations. FastLED is one popular library that has all kinds of animations posted online. In a separate video, Dave covers a handful of animations you can get started with.