anyone have any good ideas on how to make these

[MrLights2000]

need help to find a way to make these cheaper and have the colors blue red and green inside

http://www.guitarcenter.com/Chauvet-COLORtube-2-0-801335-i1320986.gc

danny

[Macrosill]

you saw something similar last night?

[MrLights2000]

yeah i wanted to make those for next year it would be so cool to see not as many thou

danny

[MrLights2000]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BA6LEiwnyo&feature=related

here a video with what im talking about in the background

danny

[NogginBoink]

This wouldn't be too hard. I'd take the Grinch cicruit and put it on a long skinny circuit board, and instead of RJ45 jacks, put red and green LEDs on it.

There's no need to re-invent any of the electronics; just shift the parts around physically.

[ben]

This wouldn't be too hard. I'd take the Grinch cicruit and put it on a long skinny circuit board, and instead of RJ45 jacks, put red and green LEDs on it.

There's no need to re-invent any of the electronics; just shift the parts around physically.

That would be a $40 tube!

I would take some 2.5" (or close) clear tubing. Then make circuit boards that have the colors you want in the order you want and are wired for outputs to the LEDtricks board. Then glue the 4 boards to make a square in the tube. Insert is and capit tight on one end and removable on the other. Make a little grove on the end pieces so it hold the PCB in. Then wire it up to the LEDtricks.

Thats how I would do it.

Ben

[NogginBoink]

How do you figure $40?

The Grinch has 64 outputs. Use a third of them each for red, green, and blue if you want full color. That would give you 21 LEDs of each color from one Grinch; if you made it 40 inches long like the original, that's an LED trio every 2 inches from one Grinch board.

If you want to more closely emulate the original product, use two Grinch circuits for 42 LEDs of each color, 126 LEDs total. That's pretty close to the original 144 LEDs. (Or use nine LED driver chips to exactly duplicate the original.)

The Allegro chips are $1.50 each. Four of them would cost $6. Eight for $12. The additional costs are circuit board, filter caps, and a power supply. Use a power supply from a discarded computer for free. The circuit boards would be the biggest cost. You could build a single board that has five rows of three LEDs and make it skinny, and string several end-to-end. Better yet, use the Allegro chip in constant-current mode and you don't need current-limiting resistors on your LEDs, and don't have to worry about the different voltage drop from different color LEDs.

I'm sure the circuit board could be made single-sided. Silvercircuits.com offers 8x11 panels. Make the board, say, 4 inches by 1.5 inch and you could get 14 boards on a single $26 panel. That's about $1.85 per circuit board.

$1.85/board * 9 boards = 16.65
Nine driver chips = $13.5
Nine resistors = $1
144 LEDs = $14.40 (varies on your source)

OK, you're right... that's a $40 tube. But it sure beats the original $180! :)

A LedTriks board would of course work. A LedTriks could drive 16 rows of 48 LEDs. Using three rows (red, green, blue) per tube, a ledtriks could drive 5 color tubes. But the costs for the circuit boards for the tubes are still going to be a factor even if the drive circuitry is a little less, and I think the logistics of wiring the tubes would be problematic.

[ben]

I am sorry I misundertood what you were saying. That would work just as well. I suggested the LEDtricks since that is what its made for but the Grinch could be just as easily adapted.

Ben

[NogginBoink]

I think this would work well. Especially if you used three-color LEDs. You could mount the LED's on one side of the board and the IC's on the other to make the board really really skinny.

And you'd get to brag that your light show had a bajillion channels! :D