Glow In The Dark Ghosts?
What started out as a desire to update the closet lighting test fixture with Halloween colors turned into an all out Halloween decoration passion. Bored, I was able to figure out the colors while sitting in a meeting. The rest kind of just happened, starting with getting the Halloween decorations down from the attic. We've had the skeleton candelabra for years, and the bulb in the skull finally burned out. We'd already replaced the neon flicker bulbs over the years as they wore out.
I have a box of Christmas style C7 bulbs, looking for the orange one. I guess I forgot they were blinker bulbs. Not really the best fit for solid glowing eyes. I guess I also forgot we used up all the neon flicker bulbs. Time to order more. I figure we'll see if flickering eyes look better than always on. The answer is yes they do. Then it hits me, I have a string of incandescent bulbs I can replace with those neon flicker bulbs to decorate the office with.
Meanwhile, Nick had sent me a picture of a ghost supposedly holding candles, but the ghost is really flipping me off. If I force myself to see candles, then maybe, but I always see flipping the bird first. Then I saw the identical picture in my inbox from one of those Chinesium sites. I joked with Nick about how we could use an old white sheet and 3D print some "candles" to make our own out of the skeleton candelabra. He found someone actually made an STL file and sent it to me!
The first two I 3D printed in white, after reducing them to 50% original size. Full size takes 7 hours to print, but the "half pints" only a little over an hour and a half. Then I thought why not use glow in the dark filament and UV LEDs to make them glow constantly? The next two were glow in the dark blue. Then two more in glow in the dark green. While those were printing, I outfitted the blue ones with UV LEDs and a battery connector to power them. Half pint success!
All I have is green and blue but they make other glow in the dark colors too. When the purple arrived, I loaded it up and printed a couple more half pints. Then a full sized, 7 hour print. The red came the next day and a repeat of the purple prints. Time for full sized green and blue prints. I thought I had enough filament left on the mini spool. Wrong. Monitoring it past midnight, I drifted off. Big mistake. Ran out of filament 5 hours into a 7 hour print!
So now I have a "decapitated" ghost. The first full size fail. Let's try the blue. At least this time when it ran out, I was ready to swap in the new spool, but it's obvious they're two different filaments. Bummer. One full size homogenous blue coming up. Sucess. Time to swap in the new glow in the dark green spool and kick off a full size print. While all this is going on, I'm prototyping the UV LED guts for the full size purple ghost.
While the prototype glows the way I want it to, I'm not very happy with the excess wiring hanging out the bottom. The revised plan uses a DIY circuit board, built from perf board and copper tape. If I was making a production run of these, I would have actual PC boards made, but these will do the trick for now. Where the half pints are quick and easy, maybe 5 minutes to complete, these full sized ones take an hour or more. And all of them glow brightly!
When Nick and I were discussing my luck with Nate, the decapitated ghost, he told me I should be able to just drop all but the part that didn't print beneath the build plate and the slicer should only print what's above it. Time to fix Nate and give him back his head (and "amputated" fingers). Then plan is to glue them back on. So now we'll have two mismatched, full sized ghosts.
Those 4 LEDs in the half pints will run for days on a single 2000mAh battery. The 36 LEDs in the full sized ones? Not so much. Time for a "battery eliminator" harness. First is just a 4 into 1 harness that takes four battery connectors into one, then a USB micro connector to battery connector converter. I made a couple of each and now as long as they're plugged in, they're always on. Perfect!
