LED “WAVEGUIDE” EXPERIMENT

So here’s a little test of a ‘waveguide’ effect for LEDs.

This uses 5/8″ tube filled with clear silicone and I think it worked out pretty well. The video doesn’t capture the effect perfectly, it’s a little blown out, but you can get the idea that the light is being carried around the ring and looks a bit like it’s fluorescing from the liquid.

I started thinking about this awhile ago and finally got around to putting it all together. I initially started by trying to do tests with little sections of tubing attached to LEDs. Tried a few kinds of caulk and silicone but the only thing that really popped was the super clear silicone.

There’s a few tricks to the process. You have to fill the tube without any bubbles, which takes a bit of practice, patience, and elbow grease with a caulk gun. Then you have to smash the tube over the LED with enough excess to displace air and not allow any bubbles to form in between the LED and the tube, which blocks the light and dims the tube a lot. And you have to secure the tube to the LED to allow it to cure.

The simplest way to do all this was to just design and print the connector I had in my head for if the lighting effect worked. I made one section of tube and it looked pretty good, so I made this one with three sections.

The back ‘spine’ is hollow with a WS2812 strip doubled over so there’s an LED pointing left and right into each section of tube. The ‘waveguide’ carries light a few inches, enough for several configurations, but it can’t really replace EL wire or anything.

I didn’t include any STL’s or code because the silicone and acrylic is the trick, everything else is pretty simple to reproduce if you do this kind of thing, and if you don’t you should do that first before you start getting covered in silicone while playing with electronics.

Not sure why the video isn’t embedding but here it is.

https://youtu.be/fN1kAN9xcQ0