Sunday, October 24, 2010

LED lighting fixture being built

A few posts ago I showed some pictures of a LED light prototype. Well, a few weeks have passed and I'm full speed into building the final product, details of which I'll share in a future post.

For now check out the fixture that will hold my lights. Yesterday it was my nephew's birthday and my sister in law did an arts & crafts activity during the party. Well, I decided I could do some grown up arts & crafts (also known as DIY) while the kids would do theirs.

Here is the result.
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2 comments:

  1. How did you go about in doing this? E.g. where did you get the supplies, tools used, and instructions followed? I get encouraged seeing others do it first!

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  2. This was relatively "easy" to design and build. I knew the size it had to be because of the aquarium's size and the intended size for my "LED lamp" (those heatsinks you see on top, each will become a "3-LED lamp". I decided I wanted to make construction simple, using as much as possible standard parts I could buy at a Leroy Merlin or similar. That lead me to select L-shaped aluminum as the frame's construction material, and aluminum rivets as the joinery (I knew how rivets work from past projects, 20 to 30 years ago). I then tried to sketch it on paper, engineering style, and after 2 or 3 iterations arrived at a design that I thought worked. I purchased the parts not at a Leroy, but at a local aluminum window shop (you know, those guys who make window frames, shower "boxes", etc...). They had a nice sturdy 2,5cm x 2,5cm L-shape and they cut them at the right length for me, which saved some time. Then I marked, drilled and riveted the parts, gradually to ensure proper alignment, and it came to life. Not difficult at all, neither expensive.

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