Thinner than coroplast?

[k6ccc]

Good grief. That third sentence is supposed to end: .... and light it with this material an inch or so in front of the strip.

Darn Android auto spelling break!

Sent from my Droid Turbo via Tapatalk, so blame any typos or spelling errors on Android

[Santas Helper]

Absolutely Jim.

So the first pic is with the LED strip right against the material. The other photos have the LED strip about 1 to 2 inches away. Keep in mind I have a cheap camera and looks better in person.

Now a 1 or 2 away.

[Santas Helper]

Plus, for a limited time... A video with some more of that awesome music.

Edited August 13, 2016 by Santas Helper

[k6ccc]

Thanks Tom.  That will serve my purposes very well!  I will order some this weekend.

 

[Vinchief]

Thank you for sharing the pics and video. Will have to add that material to my list for next year. 

Is your album released already? If not, when does it release? Great music! 

[Jaynee]

Oh my gosh, Tom -  THANK YOU!  That material will be PERFECT for the lattice trees that I'm going to make.  Thank you so much for being our guinea pig and ordering it first!!

[k6ccc]

My two sheets just showed up.  Very nice!

 

[Santas Helper]

4 minutes ago, k6ccc said:

My two sheets just showed up.  Very nice!

Sweet, show us what you do with it.  Jim

[Santas Helper]

On 8/13/2016 at 9:10 AM, Jaynee said:

Oh my gosh, Tom -  THANK YOU!  That material will be PERFECT for the lattice trees that I'm going to make.  Thank you so much for being our guinea pig and ordering it first!!

I must have overlooked your reply Jaynee.

You're welcome. I'm going to mess around some more this weekend. Not sure yet if I will use it in the show. Just getting ideas and testing things. I'm curious to see what Jim does with his he just received. 

[k6ccc]

9 minutes ago, Santas Helper said:

I'm curious to see what Jim does with his he just received. 

I can tell you what I use first for some of it.  Below are the lights on top of my two brick columns.  The second photo shows what they look like inside.  Although it does not really look it in the first photo, the frosted glass does not defuse the light well enough, so you can see the individual LEDs.  Worse, because the light pattern from the LEDs is not perfectly symmetrical, the result is that one side appears redder and the other side appear cooler.  What I'm going to do is put a layer of this material around the LED arrays spaced about an inch out from the LED array.  I plan on doing that this weekend.  I will post photos...

 

 

[k6ccc]

BTW, the majority of it is expected to be used for some much nicer Tune To signs.  This is what I have run for the past two years.  Just a sheet of painted plywood with a light pointed at them.  The new ones will be internally backlit with the front face being this material.

 

[Mega Arch]

2 hours ago, k6ccc said:

BTW, the majority of it is expected to be used for some much nicer Tune To signs.  This is what I have run for the past two years.  Just a sheet of painted plywood with a light pointed at them.  The new ones will be internally backlit with the front face being this material.

 

Sounds really cool. I bet the sign will be awesome. Great use of the material. 

[Santas Helper]

2 hours ago, Mega Arch said:

Sounds really cool. I bet the sign will be awesome. Great use of the material. 

+1 on what Mega Arch said. 

Keep us posted on both turnouts Jim.

[k6ccc]

I modified one of the column lights yesterday.  It worked great, but I was not happy with my mechanical arrangement.  I'm going to re-do it a bit tonight if I have time.  The issue I had was keeping it in the proper shape.  I cut a piece eight inches tall and half the 25 inch width of the sheet.  I started out just taping the two ends together with clear shipping tape.  The result of that was a teardrop shape instead of the about four inch diameter circular "tube".  Next step was to add an adjustable plumbing pipe clamp on the very top and bottom of the tube and tighten the screw just prior to the material trying to buckle.  The metal pipe clamp had enough rigidity to keep the tube in a circle rather than teardrop shape, but I was not very happy with that arrangement.  I also have some concern about the long term survival of the shipping tape as it will be exposed indirectly to sunlight, and I don't really know how well it will take to the UV exposure over time.

The other part that I did (and had planned for quite some time) was to add some additional LEDs in the fixture in a combination of red and green only to warm up the color temperature of the fixture.  As anyone who has used RGB strips knows, if you turn all three colors up full, the result is quite blueish.  In order to get a nice white light (my desire is about 4,000 to 4,500 degrees Kelvin for those that understand the color temperature scale), my current sequences use 100% red, 70% green and 13% blue.  I had planned on adding additional red and green LEDs using some PC boards that I had made for a different project years ago.  That did not work out all that well, so I ended up adding some 60 LED per meter strip that only had the red and green wired up.  It's not perfect, but will work OK.  It also matches the similar procedure I did with the address sign when I first built it up several years ago.  That will give the advantage that whatever color I set the top lights to, should result in a very similar color on the address sign. 

More details and photos later...

 

[Mega Arch]

19 minutes ago, k6ccc said:

...... I started out just taping the two ends together with clear shipping tape. ...... I also have some concern about the long term survival of the shipping tape as it will be exposed indirectly to sunlight, and I....

 

Home Depot now stocks Clear Gorilla Tape. Twice the sticky and is moisture resistant, in case you get humidity problems in your columns.

Personal testimony- wife wrecked her car last week. She hadn't even made the first payment. So instead of duct tape, I splurged with the new Clear Gorilla Tape. GOOD AS NEW - IMHO. 

 

[Santas Helper]

Jim, I understand about the teardrop shape. It might be a matter of overlapping the edges of the material a couple inches to provide a more round shape. but I'm curious as to what you do to fix the problem either way.

And yes, looking forward to details pictures.

[Santas Helper]

3 hours ago, Mega Arch said:

Home Depot now stocks Clear Gorilla Tape. Twice the sticky and is moisture resistant, in case you get humidity problems in your columns.

Personal testimony- wife wrecked her car last week. She hadn't even made the first payment. So instead of duct tape, I splurged with the new Clear Gorilla Tape. GOOD AS NEW - IMHO. 

Daniel, barbed wire is another nice trick to hold a car together too.

[k6ccc]

Today I did version three and am VERY happy with the result.  I will hopefully have photos posted later this evening.

 

[Santas Helper]

11 hours ago, k6ccc said:

Today I did version three and am VERY happy with the result.  I will hopefully have photos posted later this evening.

 

Can't wait for any videos or pics Jim.

[k6ccc]

OK,here we go...

Before we get too far, there were two objectives of this project.  One was to improve the light diffusion from the LED arrays, and also to improve the color temperature from the arrays.  The RGB strips produce a very bluish white if all three colors are equal levels, and although I generally don't like a yellowish warm white, these were WAY too blue.  The solution was to add some additional strips that only have the red and green hooked up.  I could not do this part until the light diffusion was improved because it would show way too much.  With the light diffusion improved with this project, I was able to add the extra strips and then adjust the color balance.  Prior to yesterday's work, I ran the RGB levels at 100, 70, 12 to get a nice white light.  After adding the extra strips, my new bright white is 100,100, 50, and I'm very happy with the color.  I don't have any way to measure it, but my slightly educated guess is that it is about 4,500 degrees Kelvin.  The way that these lights were built was to wrap three meters of 60 LED per meter dumb strips around a piece of two inch ABS plastic pipe.  That resulted in 15 turns with 12 LEDs per turn for a total of 180 RGB LEDs.  I added six strips of the same RGB strip on top of the existing wrap that only have the red and green hooked up.  The addition strip was placed carefully so as not to block the light from any of the LEDs on the wrap, and was held in place with GE Silicone II sealant.  It looks goofy as all get out if you can see it, but with the light diffusion, you can't see that at all.  This added a total of 54 RGB LEDs that don't have the blue hooked up, for a total of 234 RGB LEDs in each fixture.  Note that I fully understand that the light fixture could get quite hot with that many LEDs inside, so there is a small amount of force air ventilation through the fixture.

Now onto the light diffusion.  As mentioned almost two weeks ago, the first attempt was to cut a piece of material and tape the ends together to make a tube using clear shipping tape.  That resulted in a teardrop shape instead of a round tube.  The solution to that was to add a hose clamp around it at the top and bottom which worked quite well at keeping it round.  The hose clamp was visible through the frosted glass of the light fixture so I could not put a hose clamp in the middle.  These two photos show the second version of diffusion with the extra light strips added.

The color is washed out in the photo, but the extra strip is lit yellow because the blue is not wired.  The rubber band was placed while the silicon was setting up and I had not removed it when this photos was taken.

Here are two views of the outside.  You can clearly see where the tube is inside the fixture.

It does not show much in the photo, but if you look really carefully, you can see a light yellowish line running top to bottom with a slight twist to the right where the added strips are.  It is more pronounced in person.

Version three was to create a square tube of the new material that is just inside of the frosted glass.  I found that I could not bend a single piece into a square (it broke when I tried), so I cut four pieces and taped them together with clear shipping tape.  The plastic is in contact with the frosted glass for the most part.  This diffuses the light extremely well resulting in a very even light across the entire fixture with virtually no hot spots or dead spots.  This is exactly what I was looking for.  Here are a couple photos.

Although it does look brighter in the center in these photos, that can not be seen when looking at them.  Here is a comparison of version two and three.

You can see how even the light is from version three on the left.  BTW, these photos were taken before I adjusted the color settings, so yes, they are pretty yellow.  The address sign is green for the Greenlight A Vet movement.

Today I will be changing the right hand light to version three.  Note that the address sign light was built from day one with extra strips that are red and green only.  The percentage of RG only LEDs is very close between the address sign and the column lights now, so when the lights are showing the same color, they match very closely.

This material is very easy to work with and has no obvious change to the color of the lights.  The only limitation was that I could not bend it in a sharp bend.  I am going to try to put a 90 degree bend in a scrap piece today if I heat the plastic to see if that works.  Also note that the material does eat up some of the light.  The specs on their web site says that the light transmission is 65%.  I would go along with that figure from what I saw.