LED Forest

Grant Howard from Columbia Community Church in Richland, WA brings us this awesome LED tape look.

Materials:

Plywood
Led strip tape
T8 fluorescent bulb protector covers
Frost finish spray paint
Sandpaper
Utility Hot knife
4 conductor hvac control line
24 channel dmx decoder
3a power supply
3 dmx universes
Hog4 pixel mapping

Fro Grant: We needed a setup that could be modular because of the baptismal that sits upstage in the center, so that it could be removed when we had baptisms and replace when finished.

I saw a previous design that had PVC pipe sticking out of boxes that would be lit up by several different washes and intel fixtures, so I decided so make it “self-sustainable” and as versatile as possible while staying on a decent budget.

We wanted to pixel-map the whole unit, however, due to lack of available DMX universes at the time, we did analog LED strips instead of digital. Boxes where going to be made of MDF but decided to cut cost by going with plywood. Staggered hole saw cuts gave it more depth.

Wiring the boxes was tedious but necessary. We made cable paths so that DMX and LED strip control/power could be in the same place. A couple of power supplies and DMX decoders were placed in the boxes, depending on how many lights were in a box. We cut the T8 tubing to random heights – anywhere from 4′ to 6′ – with a utility hot knife, sprayed frost finisher, and sanded the tubes. Dropped the LED strip in the tube, hot gluing the top of the strip to the tube leaving a generous “tail” at the bottom for wiring. We soldered the 4 conduit wiring to the LED strip and ran it to the DMX decoder. After hooking up power, we tested them before pulling them in the auditorium. Once in the auditorium we hooked everything up, addressed, and programmed through HOG4 pixel-mapping/matrix and…..well… that’s it!

What it would cost to get bar wash fixtures of that height and number: $25,000
Total cost was approximately: $2,000