I wanted to make a sign for myself.
…I mean it was totally for OpenSauce just to have some bling. It looks good in the shop though right?!
I used 1/4 ply with HD foam super 77’d to the back for thickness. I used these LED’s https://amzn.to/442O98T. They can be super bright, any color and dimmable. Took 4.25 strings. If I did it all perfect, it might have happened with 4.
I added some 3D printed sides and another layer of 1/4" ply for a back.
Lots of soldering and carefully bending into the slots. For each end there is no way to stretch or anything, so at the end if you are careful you can fold the last LED section to get pretty close to the right length. If you zoom in you can see a few sections where I glued on a piece of the rubber to cover the gaps.
I could not get the current right and pooped all the little drivers it came with. The replacement driver was better anyway and has a wifi app along with a higher current limit. The wiring is a mess because I cut a lot of the strings to inject the power right into the middle of two separate sections with balanced power draw on all four legs. So the “Engineering” letters are split up amongst the larger sections to get the balance pretty close.
It is weird that they show that rainbow in the description. I don’t see anything else that would indicate they are individually addressable. If you look through the customer review pics, there aren’t any that show addressable. There are a few with two colors, but I bet they used two controllers.
The drivers that come with the board say they can handle 3 strips each. They popped at anything over 2 strips. This one seems pretty happy, https://amzn.to/3N6vn9K, maybe that is from the balancing and injecting into the middle of each strip though. While the app is not needed, it does let you have some sound activated effects, timers, and finer control.
“We do this, not because it is easy, but because we think that it will be easy!”
I forget exactly where I heard this paraphrase first, but I’m sure that I’ve read it on this forum before. It applies to many things that I do for hobbies.
