I think I’m failing on searching for what I want because I don’t know terms - does anyone know what the sort of lights that can be connected like this are called? There’s a link in the holiday snow globe in the Premium catalog, but I can’t tell what bits of the name of that product are actually relevant to finding similar light strips where a color can be set, which is what I actually want.
Also trying to figure out ways to power them - it looks like there’s some USB → DC adapters, and then there’s DC → Plug stuff, but it’s hard to tell what’s legit vs what may or may not burn someone’s house down.
Anyone got recommendations of places I can learn more about how to do the “custom strips with connected electricity” part of building this and how to vet these random electrical parts? Thanks!
Depends on a few things… do you want to do custom colors that change, or just a solid color that stays solid?
If you want just single color, just look for 12 volt led strips, you can power it with any 12v power supply, like a wall wart. You probably will want a switch of some sort, and some 2.1mm barrel connectors (female) to put in your custom case.
If you want color changing leds, there are two main ways to go about it: semicustom with leds and a remote, or full custom where you have a microcontroller and led strips and you have some coding to do.
What are you wanting to do, and I’m sure we can find parts for you.
I’d like to just be able to pick one color - it’d be nice to be able to grab a strip where I can set the color once at setup time, and then just ship it off and it stays that color all the time after it’s done.
I feel like if I want the multicolor stuff the pucks from amazon are probably a much better deal.
Yeah because you need a controller and a led strip. That being said, if you want to get into microcontrollers, it’s not hard, but it requires some soldering/programming. All depends on your expected volume and whether or not it’s interesting as a challenge for you.
If I were in your shoes and didn’t want to get into buying strips of ws2812b or apa102 LEDs I might buy these bases and then take them apart, putting the guts into whatever custom enclosure I had in mind.
Here’s an example of the more in depth microcontroller method, and you can see how I was able to make a very custom piece.
Neato! Yeah the programming is not the problem, it’s what I do for a living. It’s the soldering - I don’t think I should be super-close to electric circuits unsupervised, especially not with liquid hot metal. I have a heat gun for resin projects and I barely trust myself with that.
That’s why the LED strips are attractive to me, because those little clips you can attach to them allow you to do some neato stuff without having to solder.
And to start with I’m not necessarily looking for something that can be microcontrolled, just something where I can build out a base myself with a single color that isn’t white. Maybe eventually when I have a shed to put a soldering iron where I won’t burn down the whole house trying to use it…
I like your idea of taking the guts out! I did this recently with some coin cell-operated LED candles. I needed a whole bunch for some light-up cat-o-lantern puzzles, but didn’t have time to buy them from Digikey. So I found a set of 24 battery operated tea lights that were 50% off at Bed, Bath & Beyond, then pulled out just the batteries to use. Worked out great! I just slipped a rainbow LED on the battery and taped it together in an acrylic frame, because simplest is best
