There was someone at Dorkbot a while ago who had a ring of strip multicolor LED's in a diffused white plastic tubing. I thought it looked pretty good.
I would try going to Home Depot and look at their PVC tubing and see if there is any thing there. I know there is clear PVC tubing and black pvc tubing; perhaps there could be frosted clear. All else fails, get some semi clear (frosted) shower curtains and cut into strips and wrap them around the strips of LED's. Truly, Mark Allyn Portland, Oregon www.allyn.com 971-563-7588 On Sat, 9 Aug 2014, Zach Archer wrote:
On Sat, Aug 9, 2014 at 11:02 AM, Mykle Hansen <[email protected]> wrote: What's your favorite cheap/easy way to get a string of programmable RGB LEDs, 30-50 feet long, that can let us send lighting changes in a wave from one end to the other? My favorites: LED strips: Order the WS2812b model from aliexpress.com . I've had good luck with a vendor named "Ray Wu", very fast delivery and competitive prices. Microcontroller: PJRC's Teensy 3.1, with the OctoWS2811 Adaptor board. I'd want to insert these deep inside the arms of the squid, surrounded by transluscent puffy filling inside some kind of transluscent plastic skin, so hopefully it'd diffuse nicely into a general inner glow. I suggest figuring this out before ordering 30-50 feet of LED strips. Maybe buy 1 meter from an American vendor (Sparkfun/Adafruit) and build a proof of concept. My experience is that LED diffusion *never* looks as nice as you hope. I would probably try a clear plastic exterior (maybe with a coating of spray frost on the inside), then stuff it full of crumpled cellophane. Tissue paper would probably absorb too much light. Then also we'd need a control/power solution for approximately ten of those arms, and some kind of software framework or library for trying to achieve the kind of trembling irridescent stuff that I've seen squids do. I can offer help if you're having programming issues. I like programming for WS281X. Power-wise: 30 feet of WS2812b @ 60LEDs/meter == ~9 meters * 5V * 0.05A * 60 == 135 watts at full brightness. Yowza. If you're only lighting a few LEDs at a time, then you're probably OK. But if there's a bug in your program, and the LEDs suddenly draw too much power, well... You're in undefined territory. I'm probably only going to have limited time for this but if I can price out something off-the-shelf I may be able to find budget for it. I hate to say it, but the project you're describing is *big*. If you can get a 1-meter proof-of-concept working by next weekend, then you *might* be able to source all the parts and get everything assembled in time for XOXO. -- Z
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