Light Box

Date started: November 2019, Senior year of high school

I made a light box. The story goes, that a stage light fell, and broke in our high school auditorium. I asked the band director if I could take it apart to fix it, and he agreed. After fiddling with it for a while, I eventually was able to fix it, in an unconventional way. It was so unconventional, that I was encouraged to not return it to the auditorium, as it may have been a fire hazard. So, I then asked if I could just have it. Again, the band director didn't mind. I then took it home, and took the LED's from the light, to create my light box.

In the images below, I have the LED panels from the light out on my kitchen table. I soldered them together eventually. After that, I made a small wooden box (in the right picture) that the light panels attached to. Inside of the box, is my Arduino controller, that can control the lights.

I then made a diffused plexi-glass outer box, so that the light would diffuse, and make a more visually appealing effect.

Here are all of the single colors of the light box. More colors are possible by varying the voltages to each color. In theory, any color is possible by varying the output voltages.

The coolest use that I found for the light box, was on our 2020 Flyer Robotics robot. Other than being visually appealing by glowing purple (our high school's school color), the light box served other purposes as well. On that year's robot, we had a vision tracking camera, that would help us line up our shots. When the robot was tracking the target, the box glowed red, and when the robot was targeted, the box flashed white, letting the driver know that we were lined up. Also, there was a color wheel that needed to be spun during a portion of the game. The wheel needed to be spun to a random color, which was sent to the robot code. When the color was sent in the code, the light box would turn to that color for the remainder of the match. For instance, if the random color was red, the whole box would turn red.

My light box was very fun to build, and I think that it turned out great. I learned a lot along the build process, and I am very proud of it.