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Rope Light Arches


Roger Leon Forbes

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Someone told me there was a topic on this, but I can't find it. I was given several hundern feet of 4 color rope light, red, green, blue, clear. I was thinking about useing it to make arches. This rope light is marked for cut every 36" and is three wire. I have lots of the splicers and the ends for it. Also have three small controllers that can run up to 150 feet per unit or split into two 50 foot. But if I cut it to 36" and put like 4 runs per 36" and tie them all togeather over a 1" pipe would that not work.

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If it's 4-color with 3 wires, then I assume it uses diodes (or is it LED?) to multiplex two colors on 1 wire. You could wire it to 4 LOR channels using 4 diodes and be able to control each color separately. (It would be technically possible for LOR to have the LOR firmware be able to control 2 polarities separately, doubling the channels, but that's a different topic.)

However, if the rope light is marked for cuts every 36", then it would be difficult to use this on a normal sized arch, because it would probably be too tight to wrap it around a 1" pipe. So your 8-channel arch would have to be 24 feet long.

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Just for discussion Steven. I am trying to figure your math. So, please point out any errors you see.

1" pipe has a circumference of about 3.14", right so far? But I think one would have to add about half of the thinkness of the rope light also, right also?
But in order to do this without a calculator, let me just call it 3" for now. Ok 3 goes into 36, 12 times. So for 36" of lets say 3/4" thick rope light. So 12 wraps, times .75 and we come up wth about 9" length of wrap for each 36" length of rope light. How am I doing? But something in the back of my head says that due to some fudging errors we might get about 11 wraps and total length will be more like 8 - 8.25".

Ok so were did I make a mistake in my calculations?

Thanks

Max

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Max-Paul wrote:

Just for discussion Steven. I am trying to figure your math. So, please point out any errors you see.

My mistake.

I assumed (incorrectly, based on the old thread) that rope light would be damaged if coiled tightly around a 1" pipe.
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