Stick Lights
Recently, I got the Lego Typewriter set and wanted to record a time-lapse of me building it. But I realised I didn’t have very good lighting to do the recording. So instead of building the typewriter, I built these lights. Combined with some 3D printing, they’re made of stuff I had lying around namely, some wood, 3D printer filament spools and some LED strips.
The lights are designed to be temperature adjustable. There are two LED strips in each light; one warm and one cool. Each strip is independently controlled via a dimmer module. The dimmer module is made of two PWM dimmers I bought from eBay that are housed in a 3D printed case.
Notes from the Build
The wood was prepared first. I sanded it and rounded the edges to prevent splinters. During sanding I wasn’t too precise and so the wood ended up with one stick being 1mm thinner than the others. This meant I needed to make two versions of the 3D prints.
The fastening method of choice for this build were impromptu grub screws. These were made with an M3 screw and nut, where the nut was embedded within the 3D print. This meant by tightening the screw, the screw would drive itself into the wood. Other methods were considered but this was the easiest to implement at the time.
There is a loop at the top of the lights to hold a 16mm diameter rod. The thinking behind this was to add additional top-down lighting onto the table. This ultimately didn’t work as planned as so the loop remains unused.
I noticed when the light was close to a wall, it was possible to see two different colour temperatures on the wall. In future, I may need to add a diffuser to the light.
