LED light cube advice

[jon_nais]

Hi,Building some LED light cubes to act as some stage features.Cube is built out of 50cm lengths of 20mm conduit, 3mm hard board on two faces which have 5m of LED tape ran up and down.Our issue is now what to cover the cube in! I would like something that lets enough light through so that the cube lights up good and proper, but also opaque enough so that you can't see the individual LEDs on the strip.

Does anyone have any advice on what to use? Has to be fairy cost effective as we have ten of these to build....

Many thanksJon

[PJG]

I did some thing a bit like that with a box that was 1m by 1m and 30cm deep faced with Perspex and 5m of led tape on the rear. I used http://www.mdpsupplies.co.uk/translucent.asp which is used for take away signs and you could not tell what or where the light source was and was fine under stage lighting. I tried a heavy frost first but that did not work.

[OllieDuff]

Perspex and polycarbonate sheets come with scratch-resistant white film on them - if the film on one site it plain (no logos or anything), that can make for a ready-made, free diffuser. I had success with that method (clear polycarbonate plus white film) when making some breakaway stained glass windows, which when intact needed to show shadows of people moving outside, but no clear features.

[Ken Coker]

This is probably a bit useless for you now, but on a larger scale a club night in Manchester uses industrial water containers:

 

http://theritzmanchester.com/listings/upcoming-events/13351/light-boxx-17/

 

They looked ok until we tripled the size of the lighting rig.....

 

Probably best watched with the sound down.

 

KC

[andy_s]

Perspex and polycarbonate sheets come with scratch-resistant white film on them - if the film on one site it plain (no logos or anything), that can make for a ready-made, free diffuser. I had success with that method (clear polycarbonate plus white film) when making some breakaway stained glass windows, which when intact needed to show shadows of people moving outside, but no clear features.

 

or just buy opal polycarbonate in the first place...

 

you can buy illuminated cubes with colour changing leds inside, they are sold as "garden furniture" I believe. As far as I remember they were about £100 each, probably come down in price since then... If you are time-rich and cash-poor, making your own is probably a better bet. We had a dozen for a show a while ago, which saved us lots of time, except that the colour changing controller was a bit random, a bit like led fairylights, we couldn't specify which colour would be the default switch-on colour, which was not ideal. so we decide to replace the leds with white ones, and then the built-in rechargeable battery was not beefy enough, so we replaced those as well. So effectively, what we had bought was some nice moulded cubes, and everything else was custom-built.

 

(I say "we", I really mean our resident boffin who knows about soldering and electronics and stuff)

 

(I like Ken's water containers. Thanks Ken for the advice about keeping the sound down.)

[c0astman]

I've used a plain white bed sheet, folded double, with success in the past. The cotton diffuses the light well and creates a colour block appearence. Cheap too!

 

If the LED's aren't that powerful, you may only need one thickness of cloth

[pirasa]

You can use translucent white acrylic boards orpolycarbonate sheets whichever is cheaper in your local store. But I thinkwhite canvas can also deliver the same effect or white cotton cloth; for surethere far cheaper than the boards. If you need dramatic color change andbrightness control for setting stage mood there is a tri-color LED stripavailable in the market that comes with a remote controlled box. It is alsocapable of producing rhythmic light sequence.