I recently moved house and wanted to upgrade my recordShelf as part of the transition. This update will focusly mainly on hardware and IKEA furniture modification.

In my previous google searches looking for IKEA Expedit or Kallax shelves with lighting set-ups I found this page with a beautifully modified shelf with recessed LED strips in each shelf. It looked so much cleaner than my set up and I wanted to emulate it the best I could. The woodworking challenges presented to me were the pretty difficult for me as I've never used a router and I needed to do a lot of routing for this project.

3 weekends back, IKEA had a sale on the particular shelf I was after and I decided it was time to begin this project. I got the shelf, brought it home, opened up the packaging and started to get a plan together.

Routing



To decide on where to put the channel for the LED strip I looked at my old lighting setup and measured how far back I had mounted them. The distance ended up landing between the two holes that receive pegs as part of the shelfs assembly. I covered the line I'd be routing out with blue painters tape to help reduce the amount of chipping of the laminate/veneer.

I then needed to drill holes at an angle from the inside of the LED channel towards the back of the shelf where the wires would run. There were three locations on each shelf/LED strip where wires would attach and run back so I needed three of these holes on each shelf. I only punched through the wrong side by drilling too far on one of the fifteen holes I had to make.





To keep a clean look, I wanted to also route out channels for the wires to run back towards the back of the shelf. This channel would require two passes with the router as I wanted to create a little shoulder or ledge that I could attach a finishing piece to, to hide the wiring. This turned out quite well with the inner channel being just wide enough to accept the 3-wire cable I'm using.





Prepping LED Strips



The LED's I chose are the same that I've been using in past versions of the shelf. WS2812b's with a resolution of 60 pixels per meter. This breaks down to 20 pixels fitting nicely in each individual box of the shelf. I could've just left the strip as one long continuous piece for each shelf but I opted to space out strips of 20 evenly with small jumpers inbetween so that the LED's would fall perfectly between the vertical supports on each horizontal shelf.





Another caveat with the wiring and prepping of the LED strips was that I had to consider the data limitations of the Fadecandy board that I was planning on using. The fadecandy can power up to 512 pixels, 64 per output, 8 outputs. This meant that while one single fadecandy could run all 500 pixels on my shelf, it would cause some really odd runs and daisy chaning together of led strip in order to get the data topology seperated into 8 sections that were less than 64 each. Instead, I opted to add a 2nd fadecandy, and to use 10 seperate data runs that each handled 50 pixels. This meant a more simple wiring scheme with one data line running to the first pixel on each shelf as well as the 51st pixel, exactly in the middle each shelf. To insert a data line into the center of each strip, I cut the full assembled strip in half, and then remade the + and - power connections but didn't bridge the data, instead running a new data line to be inserted at that point.





At this point I needed to test the LED strips using the hidden wiring running through each shelf before moving too much further with assembly. Keep in mind I tested the fresh rolls when they were shipped and they all checked out then, but I checked the strips at many points throughout this build to ensure that all the soldering/wiring I was doing was good.





Silicon Adhesive

With the LED's all checked out, the next step was to permanently adhere the LED strips to the aluminum channel, the aluminum channel to the shelf and all wiring to the shelf. The LED strip...