Canvas

I had printed a bunch of different shapes to try out when I was making the circle frame, and had some odd pieces left over. I try not to throw stuff away when it can be repurposed, and that is how these lights came to be.

Canvas started as four (and then, a few years later, six) separate lights, but they have since been rebuilt into a single light with one controller to run them all in sync. This allowed the effects to flow from one frame to another, which made for a neat look.

This project is really just the evolution of the combination of ideas I had with Frame and the Circle Light. I had already discovered that painters canvas makes a decent diffuser, and I had a bunch of ideas on how to make more of them.

These are made with 6" Pre-Stretched Canvas Frames (like $9 for a stack of them) that I fit over a piece of heavy cardboard (from the fridge box again) on which I had hot glued a few LED strips in rows. I stuck a bunch of tesselating stencil shapes I had 3d printed on them, (a tessellated lizard, the Starfleet insignia, some leftover hexagons from Honeycomb, and some of the center shapes I used in the circle light).

Originally, I had nested all of the shapes together (like Honeycomb), but after playing around a bit, I decided the effect worked better with spacing between them.

While printing these, I used any old PLA I had laying around. That was a mistake. It turns out that the color of the stencils has a pretty significant impact on the output. The 'Trekkie' light was printed in red PLA, and you could definitely tell! I rebuilt it a couple months later, after deciding it was too much. I replaced most of the red starfleet logos with other shapes in neutral colors.

I made four of these lights at first, and stacked them in pairs on Amy and I's nightstands in our bedroom. They were good accent lights that gave the room a nice vibe without throwing too much light. A few years later I decided to make a couple more, this time on 10" canvas. For the second batch, I drew a couple mandalas (with a mechanical pencil, like a cave man), took a picture, imported the image into modeling software, and made it 1/2" tall. Then I placed this in the frame before placing the cardboard backing behind it. The idea was that I could have a variety of shapes without printing a bunch of fiddly bits. Here is a shot of one of the inserts before it went in:

Having been horribly burned out on soldering individual LEDs from a previous project, I decided to try out string leds. These are WS2811 leds in a string light (or fairy light) format. I just cut the ends off and soldered my own controller in. They aren't terribly bright (I wouldn't buy them again) but they are okay for this purpose. With the insert and the LEDs pre-soldered, these two lights came together really quickly. They ran on their own, hanging on my wall, for about 6 months before I decided to integrate them all together.

At the time, all six of these had their own 5v power supplies, ESP8266 controller, and were more or less self contained. I disconnected them all, soldered new connectors where the controllers were, got a single (much bigger) 5v supply to power them all, and added a single ESP32 to drive the whole thing. Now what were six lights are now a single light with six individual "zones". The effects can run independently, across the entire multipart installation, or they can flow from one frame to the next.

Here are a few more shots of these:

This article is part of a series on LED Art as I attempt to document all of the different LED projects I have built over the years.
More will be added as time goes on. The list of currently available articles can be found here: https://dzw.zentormey.com/tag/leds/