So I have a topic asking about cutting the Walmart camping foam pad. Haven’t revisited that yet, because it won’t work for my application anyway. It’s a tad too translucent. I need something as a light buffer for this LED Nixie tube project:
So I really need something black, reasonably dense, and that cuts fairly well. Ideally should be between .25" and .5" thick. Anyone got a recommendation on what to get?
Keep in mind I do need to be able to cut relatively small holes (less than .25" in diameter) that end up pretty close to one another but can’t wallow out badly because then they’ll bleed light through.
I’ve been cutting EVA foam floor mats, which are just under .5" thick. It’s a bit of a stretch; it takes multiple cuts, and the edges need to be cleaned up, but it works.
If I could find thicker craft EVA foam it looks like it might work. The stuff in the post above is only about 1mm thick according to the post and I need at least 6mm thick, preferably more like 10mm.
I know the foam floor mats you’re talking about, and even have some. Haven’t tried it yet, but I’d really like to find something I could cut in one pass since I don’t need something quite as dense as that foam anyway.
Got the 6mm “Darifoam” or whatever it’s called from Amazon and it works great. THANKS EVERYONE! The small holes wallow out some at 200/85 single pass, but not enough to matter for my application. And the black foam works a TON better than the blue Walmart camping pad foam did for this application.
On the left is the current Arduino running it, along with a custom shield on top with a Real Time Clock module. The tiny PCB by itself is a sample of the Arduino that WILL run it, though I’m going to toss the RTC module in favor of a wifi module instead. You’ll configure the wifi with any wifi device and then it’ll get time from the network. There will be an app that will let you configure it or maybe even use it as a timer, scoreboard, etc. Also planning to have it support more digits, but two are all I have complete at the moment.
Under the right digit is one of the LED boards that’s on the bottom of each digit. And to the right of that is a foam light buffer that’s between each PCB and the stack of acrylic digits.
FWIW, in daylight you can’t get a decent picture for crap, but you can see it much better than it appears, and I’ll add a black box around the finished units that should let you see it really well in all conditions.
