DIY Tunable LED Light Panels 

Dude nobody measures LED color temperature in imperial, LoL. 6000k is annoying common. That high temp is bluish and fatigues your eyes over time. 5000k is my limit, ideally 4500k neutral is more relaxing to visual reception.

​@@Accumulator1I like it during the day, low colour temps in the middle of the day feel drowsy imo

Home Depot and the other big box stores sell 48" x 24" acrylic clear and frosted diffusers with several different textures for about $10.00. They can be cut to size quite easily with a saw or scored with a knife and snapped off.

My thought too. Spray paint works well I suppose but will eventually rub off. Sanding is a bit more permanent. I imagine that the spray it easier to keep more uniform though.

If using a small grit wet sandpaper like 600-800 i would think it will be fairly easy to get a uniform dullness. Coarser grit sizes will make swirls and scratches from the sanding action more visible to the naked eye just like it will do on shitty paint job on a car

Or you can just buy translucent acrylic. BTW, you need a fine tooth table saw blade to cut acrylic and plexiglass.

Takes a lot more elbow grease to get as consistent as the spray paint, and this isn't going to be touched often, so the wear and tear on the part isn't really a major concern.

very good !

John Grubbs Just using a potentiometer is rather inefficient and you have less of a smooth transition from off to full brightness (from my own experience) EDIT: I forgot to note that the potentiometer is inefficient as it dumps the excess energy as heat.

Thanks Oneil. The reason I tend to let the wires free is because I make changes so often, I don't want to set things too permanent too soon. I do agree that inside that home it is important to be neat.

Peter I'm curious too. What's the advantage of soldering like you did?

I'd say she soldered this way as a sanity check when wiring up the rest of the system, so that she could easily see which wires belonged to each color LED. However, for additional redundancy it would also be good practice to solder at the ends as you did, Peter, in case of a lost connection that would result in a dead strip.

If you end up with a dead strip it is easier to replace it if you solder at the ends only

Wendy, any LED strip should work fine with the dimmers Lin used. As long as you're​ trimming the DC voltage coming from the power supply you'll be fine. LED bulbs that screw into standard lighting fixtures don't play well with dimmers because they have built in transformers that are built to convert 120VAC (or 240 in your case) to 12VDC (or whatever) only. The dimmer switches found in most homes are going to trim the AC voltage going to the socket which plays hell with the bulb's circuitry, and things will not work well. They make dimmable bulbs that have smarter, and more expensive, transformers but as you've noticed they are much less common. Lin gets around this by providing a steady 12v from the power supply and running that through the dimmer circuit. The LEDs are happy to accept anything from 0-12VDC coming from the dimmers.

The cool white leds draw significantly more power so I used a more substantial dimmer to deal with that.

Hi Ken, I just added the barrel plugs to the amazon parts list. It allows you to connect the power supply without cutting the cable.

You can buy even cheaper on ALIEXPRESS

Another website would be banggood.com. But if you use the links Linn provides it generates income for her.

thanks! the cool white lights use more power.

thanks!