And it was sweaty hot that day.
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Those are excellent! Did you used colored LEDs or did you color them yourself?
I uploaded a bitmap in a followup reply for the engrave.
The gradient wasn’t worth the time to make a difference.
I am so glad the badges worked for you. They are a bit “fiddly”, but it worked on my first attempt.
BTW the reflection is perfect, nice job!
I used the color changing LEDs listed earlier.
I kept a chisel handy after the first glue up to ensure there was room for the ends of the acrylic to seat. I needed to do that a couple of times even with the alignment jig. I also broke one acrylic insert while inserting.
Thank you for your additional information to this super cute badge tag idea. I am new (like brand new) and want to try this for my first project. Your Halloween tags turned out so great. I was wondering for your engrave for the acrylic, did you choose Draft or SD or HD graphic? Thank you for any further info you might care to share!
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If you re-read @stoli’s post they didn’t use any of the default settings but instead set speed/power manually.
To get a very shallow, but noticeable, engrave in PG acrylic, I used speed:800, power:65, LPI: 270, and defocus:0.25. I believe 270LPI corresponds to SD. The defocus (0.125 above the nominal surface) helps to smooth out any artifacts from the mastering.
I created a mini material test board that only varied power and speed in a grid of rounded rectangles and chose what I liked the best.
Note that I only changed the acrylic engrave because the default deep etch did not suit my taste. But, it would be perfectly acceptable to leave the engrave at the default setting. The only tailoring needed is for the engrave on the draft board to create enough room for the LED.
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Thank you so much for your quick reply and for this additional information! You gave me all the settings I needed and I was able to create some cute Christmas LED badges. I was using some purchased LED badges and did not know I should have removed the acrylic covering so the results for the first one was ‘interesting’. But after that they all came great!
Thank you for your help. I thought they had started with one of the default settings and then made manual adjustments to it. Trying hard to learn how to use my Glowforge.
Where did you purchase LED badges? Did they come with blank acrylic?
I really liked the design bwente shared and plan to give it a go so that I can make the whole LED badge myself. But I had already ordered these LED supplies so used them. I purchased them from here:
https://www.xstron.com/rgb-led-glow-badge-card-blank-acrylic-plate
They came with a blank acrylic (just remember to remove the plastic covering 
. They also came in a nice little white box and have a nice black cord to use when wearing them. They have four little screws so you can remove the LED part so you can just place the acrylic blank in the Glowforge. They come with batteries installed but they can be replaced and I ordered the type needed from Amazon. The acrylic blanks are a nice size I thought. The LED has a on/off switch on the side and has multiple modes - flashing and 7 single colors - easily changed by a small button on the front. The company also has several other LED products that I liked - one was a small key chain that is just like the badge but the acrylic black is smaller and it comes with a clip clasp but you could use the badge black cord on it to make a smaller necklace. Their LED items were reasonably priced I thought but their shipping was VERY expensive. However they arrived very quickly and everything was in good shape and worked. I ordered a number of items which made the shipping a bit more reasonable per item. I hope I can figure out how to cut additional acrylic blanks for them myself but the fit of the blank into the LED part is pretty tight so the shape would have to be pretty exact. I would post a pic of my Christmas LED badges with this post but I haven’t figured out how to do that yet. Lots to learn! Thanks again for your help!
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The original design of the holder is nice, and personalizable on the GF, but you have to source all the other components.
The xstron badges look interesting as they include a switch, led, battery, and lanyard. Doing it all yourself will probably end up being cheaper, but only if you go through the full bag of leds or chains.
OMG I Love this… Are the electrical parts easy to find?
It is a variation of a LED throwie. I had LEDs and batteries at home. But if you want to get started you can get LEDs from Amazon.
Batteries too. You should be able to find a better deal than the first on I searched for.
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Goodly design. After a few tweaks, I made a few of these for my buddy’s gallery show opening this weekend (with social distancing guidelines in place). I made a a few bits on the forge for him and built some electronics to help him achieve his vision. As he worked on the concept, it kept getting bigger in scope. WIth covid keeping us at a distance, I have only seen bits and pieces as I delivered parts (and there are a lot of them). I am looking forward to seeing the entire thing assembled. The coin icon on the badge evolved from an early piece (nerdy gurdy) and is now a thread that weaves through the ensemble. Photos later.
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The screws definitely make it easier to replace the battery. Nice job.
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very nice! Can’t wait to see the finished product!
nice job !!
Nicely done! I’m VERY new to this type of creating but so far, it has really gotten me excited. I REALLY appreciate the open sharing of designs and SVG files in this community. Think I found a new home.
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Frigin AWESOME!!!
files that I used…
I cut the part on the left from clear acrylic, feel free to swap out the artwork for whatever floats your dingy.
the parts on the right from 1/8th plywood. I used metric bolts M4 with no nuts, they seemed to stay together well enough with the given interference. The extra smaller battery cutout is a mistake but it causes no harm other than extra cut time by a few seconds.
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