Recent content by DIYLED

What about this hard hat I found in a remote part of Joshua Tree? :)

That's quite a story. Could you explain what the mistakes were? AC is not my specialty. It sounds like they should have used a thicker green wire if unbalanced and only grounded the conduits on 1 end. And maybe it's standard practice to balance phases through large conduits?I would have...

I had meant signal common, not earth ground. The DC ground, not the AC ground.That is odd that the shared ground was on the same phase and I'm guessing the same gauge as the hots and neutrals. Even more strange that the green wires were carrying current and nobody noticed that something was...

I usually use cat5e with molded RJ45's. Bestlinknetware has a variety of lengths. In some situations it can be pulled with l-com brand covers taped over the connectors, and hardware stores have electrician's lubricant. But it is easier to pull non-crimped cat5e over long distances, tight...

It could actually be a dark gray Lexan (polycarbonate) without camera dynamic range effects. The Philips iColor player is made of that and has an interior indicator LED that corresponds to the first light, if sending DMX in 8-bit mode. A dark surface for attaching the LED's could also...

How about a bunch of mini work lights? The way to "dim" them is to only turn on 1 of them and turn off all the others. :)

The backing sticks better to some tapes than others. It slowly peels awayfrom VHB 5952, seems to stick well to rp45 and 4905/4910. Woodis best sealed with paaintor glue but 4095 sticks ok to wood.typing on a tablet sucks!

If the edge is rough, it might be easier to first start off with a mini sanding tool that has a ball joint, then use a polishing wheel. The type of acrylic work I do is usually different than what most people are doing, but once in awhile I'll do something similar.Acrifix 117 w/ Serrox...

Actually I realized that tutorial site might be missing some subtleties of circuit design. For example, adding capacitors to high-gain opamp stages ("pre amps") can prevent amplification of very slight DC offsets. But it is a very good web site.

Here's a really good web site for learning electrical theory in a practical way: https://www.electronics-tutorials.ws/ https://www.electronics-tutorials.ws/dccircuits/kirchhoffs-current-law.html The terminal blocks for red, green, and blue wires are just a wide double trace connecting all wires...

Thanks. It is actually portable. On site we only have to connect Romex and network cables (for art, not music shows, otherwise I would use XLR's).There's actually 5 machine screws (mini bolts). The next time I might move them farther away from the terminal blocks so they aren't in the way...

Levers make things easy. Without these, it would have been a real pain in the ass to do this a bunch of times:It's kind of hard to see in this 2nd photo, but the big white wire is connected to a big red wire in the upper left:The load is spread out on 6 fuses for this single power...

One trick to avoid injuries or recover from them is to learn how to do basic tasks with non-dominate hand. So if you're right-handed and it doesn't require too much coordination, holding the drill with the left hand can really pay off. Then in rare moments that require more skill, using the...

A lot of the LED strip distributors sell Klus fixtures that diffuse the LED's. They can be dimmed with DMX decoders. Klus has an economic line with I think polystyrene or acrylic as well as more spendy products with polycarbonate.

The product you're looking for is a "DMX decoder" for LED strips. For the addressable LED's (digital) they are sometimes called "pixel decoders".If the controller doesn't have smooth transitions as a feature, there's a crude but easy workaround using capacitors if it's an analog LED strip, or...