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I have not jumped onto the LED ring bandwagon as many of you may know.

The primary reasons being that I really do not like the idea of adding any weight to the effector since I really like to push the speed without loss of quality.

So here is my approach of doing it and it has a few bonus tricks to show for it too. Still working out the kinks, but it is essentially a large clear acrylic ring with a flexible multicolored led ring facing inwards on the outside of it. The effect is that the ring slightly diffuses the ring and also directly focuses the light into the center of the build platform.

The ring is large enough to not be within the print area (not the edges I use anyways.

No added weight on the effector at all.

No effect on build height at all either.

Gonna try to hack the light changing feature to show red while bed is heating and blue when cold. Greenn when ready to print and white when printing.
Here are some pics.

The different led colors are accessible through seperate traces on the flexible package that they are mounted too. So it's really a matter of simply feeding the 12v signal to the color of led you wish to illuminate. Which is easily taken from the feeds of the controller board.

I have accomplished this with success by wiring up individual 5mm rgb led and gluing it in this. print it in something not translucent, and most the light goes into the glass. I was running the logic using Arduino Nano.... i think you could just wire in a temperature sensor onto it and set the temperature thresholds for your desired color. I think it would work better if the glass was = 300mm to same as the onyx bed, or a little bit thicker so a http://www.adafruit.com/products/1138 would fit. while finding this link i also see that ada added http://www.adafruit.com/products/322 which would work also.

bubbasnow wrote:I have accomplished this with success by wiring up individual 5mm rgb led and gluing it in this. print it in something not translucent, and most the light goes into the glass. I was running the logic using Arduino Nano.... i think you could just wire in a temperature sensor onto it and set the temperature thresholds for your desired color. I think it would work better if the glass was = 300mm to same as the onyx bed, or a little bit thicker so a http://www.adafruit.com/products/1138 would fit. while finding this link i also see that ada added http://www.adafruit.com/products/322 which would work also.

Do you have a picture?

0x3ngineering wrote:

bubbasnow wrote:I have accomplished this with success by wiring up individual 5mm rgb led and gluing it in this. print it in something not translucent, and most the light goes into the glass. I was running the logic using Arduino Nano.... i think you could just wire in a temperature sensor onto it and set the temperature thresholds for your desired color. I think it would work better if the glass was = 300mm to same as the onyx bed, or a little bit thicker so a http://www.adafruit.com/products/1138 would fit. while finding this link i also see that ada added http://www.adafruit.com/products/322 which would work also.

Do you have a picture?

im having bed issues so i got it all tore apart atm, ill throw something up in a bit

Hey Flatty, that really looks cool!

Damn, I was thinking of lighting of the plate too. Glad it looks so cool. I did the car headlamp LED ring though, I can't see the tiny weight of it affecting the effector, but I do understand the shave off weight speed-racer mindset.