I created an LED plush toy in the form of a giant LED. The concept is that the blue light can be used to treat seasonal affective disorder during the winter months.
I really enjoyed working on this project but struggled to figure out how to get the right form for the top portion of the LED. After a trip to Canal Plastics, I decided to use an acrylic half sphere and a cylinder to create my form.
I ordered 5mm blue surface mount LEDs from superbrightleds.com so that I could mount them all to an acrylic circle and easily solder them. After laser cutting all the mounting holes, I mounted 10 of the LEDs. I soldered 100 Ohm resistors to each one and wired them up in parallel to a 3xAAA battery pack.
I then mounted the circle in the acrylic cylinder and tied a washer to the leads for strain relief.
I filled the cylinder and top of the sphere with plastic pellets and taped them together. I didn’t want to glue them in case I needed to get back in to fix the wires.
I then tried to cover the top with fiber fill and found it to be too lumpy when I covered it with white leggings.
I removed all the filling and tried quilting batting instead. The result was much more uniform! I sewed it up by hand and added some cotton legs which hide the battery pack and wires.
That’s it!
Nice post, Josh, please fix the category, it should be “finished projects”!