Young Frankenstein Electrodes!

[BobJ]

I want to make some "electrodes'" to energize the monster! So far have a couple of 3" x 60" tough cardboard tubes painted black. And, (cut from kids pool "Noodles") some doughnut like sleeves painted white to look like insulators. Several of these are mounted around the black tubes. So far so good. Now, I want to put some bright lights between the insulators that I can control independently to 'chase' the light up and down. Originally was just going to wrap three LED tapes around the tube in a spiral but this doesn't give me the chase I want.

Question: What could I mount between the insulators? My only thought so far is to construct some mini LED Panels by laying several short segments of LED tape side by side ad glued to a piece of 3" x 3" cardboard. I'd have a fair bit of soldering to do but that's OK. So any other (simpler) ideas would be welcome. Just imagine watching the scene where they energies the beast and seeing these poles pass 'current' up and down!

[DrV]

Using individually addressable LEDs would allow you to create more interesting and effective patterns.

Look up ws2801 RGB tape as a starting point

Edited July 28, 2021 by DrV

[sunray]

I want to make some "electrodes'" to energize the monster! So far have a couple of 3" x 60" tough cardboard tubes painted black. And, (cut from kids pool "Noodles") some doughnut like sleeves painted white to look like insulators. Several of these are mounted around the black tubes. So far so good. Now, I want to put some bright lights between the insulators that I can control independently to 'chase' the light up and down. Originally was just going to wrap three LED tapes around the tube in a spiral but this doesn't give me the chase I want.

Question: What could I mount between the insulators? My only thought so far is to construct some mini LED Panels by laying several short segments of LED tape side by side ad glued to a piece of 3" x 3" cardboard. I'd have a fair bit of soldering to do but that's OK. So any other (simpler) ideas would be welcome. Just imagine watching the scene where they energies the beast and seeing these poles pass 'current' up and down!

The driver part is easy... Years ago I did a halloween walkthrough event, one scene was someone in an electric chair and the curly cables (longer versions of telephone handset cords) from the box to the head set (Yep it really was a stainless steel colander) had 20 bulbs each within the curls controlled by a couple of bargraph drivers, the executioner simply turned up the volume of the pulsing electric noise to make them glow in sequence. So much easier now with LED

 

Are you trying to make the whole thing light up, starting at the bottom and working up, to indicate the higher voltage?

I imagine loads of rings of LED tape around the tube being driven as above. Thing like the LM3914 are stackable to easily provide multiples of 10 channels, on that basis there could easily be 50 rings being driven by 5 chips. From memory I think the 3914 can only drive about 20mA so each channel will need a simple transistor driver unless a higher power device is available.

 

[timsabre]

Agree with Dave. Ws2811/ws2812 pixel tape with arduino or esp32 as a controller is the easy way to do it.

[BobJ]

Thanks all. I will certainly look up that tape. I've cobbled together a simple "Electrode" to show director tonight. I was going to put a play ball on top stuffed with LED tape and make it pulse dark red! Cant work out how to paste an image here. My Bad