Stage Designs

LED Glow Sticks

Arron Hartt from Gateway Baptist Church in Ballentine, SC brings us these awesome LED light sticks.

They cut ten foot PVC poles in half, attached 1/2 female connector on one end, then attached the iron flange to that. Next they cut a 2X4 in 1ft sections and painted it all black to hide everything. Then they attached the 512 DMX decoder to 1ft section to safely secure it.

Then came actually adding the LED tape to the poles. They basically cut the tape in half and stuck what was longer than the PVC down the pipe to hide it. Next, they stripped the wire so that they would have exposed ends. Then attached that to the DMX decoder.

Materials:

[tentblogger-youtube merrLRN8Jts]

12041940_956363064410437_1871578078_n

Blue_poles

IMG_6357

White_Poles

The Gift of Glow Bi Pallets

31 responses to “LED Glow Sticks”

  1. Mark Manley says:

    Thanks for the great video – very inspiring! Don’t worry about the “best” way of doing things- this worked for you and it is awesome. I may implement it exactly as you did.

  2. Arron Hartt says:

    Thanks Mark! Let me know if you have any questions.

  3. Patrick says:

    Awesome work! Wow! Thanks soooo much for the tutorial. I’m going to order these supplies right away.

    Just a couple quick questions: did you add any diffusion? The light looks so consistent throughout the tape!

    How well do they compete with an average stage wash? If the was was cut, could these have a “blinder” like effect?

    Any suggestions for a dmx controller to program some runs through the lights, basic strobe effects, etc? Thanks so much! We’re new to this but your tutorial gave us a huge leg up!!

  4. Arron Hartt says:

    Patrick thanks so much glad the video could help!

    No we did not add any diffusion, But we thought about adding a clear tube with diffusion gel inside the tube. Sounds really good in theory but not sure how it would look.

    They definitely can be blinding at 100% we rarely use it like that tho.

    I guess your talking about a light board? We use the “Elation Show Designer 1” that works pretty good trying to budget for a Jands next year.

  5. Michael Eberhardt says:

    Hey thanks for that tutorial vid. I’m trying to figure this out still… Love this idea, but I have no idea how DMX stuff works, do I need a 512 controller for each light pole? How does the daisy chaining work?

  6. Arron Hartt says:

    Well you can power two rolls of LED tape on one DMX decoder. Yes you can daisy chain one after another

  7. Patrick says:

    Thanks for the reply Aaron! Ordering the materials for this project this week!

  8. Jeremiah says:

    Looks awesome! Thank so much for posting. Quick question – probably a dumb one. How do you cut the tape to custom size to fit each pole?

  9. Arron Hartt says:

    Jeremiah,

    Every 5 or so inches there are 3 golden ovals with a black line through it. You have to cut right there if you don’t you’ll mess up your tape.

  10. Patrick says:

    Hey Aaron, what is the 1/2″ connector for? Thanks again!!!

  11. Billy says:

    How many DMX decoders did you use? It appears there are 8 clusters of poles – did you control each cluster independently or as a group?

  12. Heather Hartt says:

    So very proud of you and all your hard work son!

  13. Wayne Boring says:

    Great job, Arron!

  14. Nick says:

    Question, did you use multiple DMX decoders, one for each set of rope, or did you somehow split the signal to each post from one decoder?

  15. Leon says:

    Question here too.. Has anyone thought about running the LED strips through some clear pipe? Just something that came to mind as I’d like to do this may finish it off alittle nicer

  16. Luigi says:

    How many dmx decoders were used for this project? Also how were you able to get the ice white color?

  17. Jamie VanDyke says:

    What program are you using to control the lights? I’m using Jands Vista with a generic LED RGB but can’t get control of the lights.

  18. Chris Ross says:

    Yes! Great tutorial man! you are so right there are next to none out there, so thank you!

    question, if i wanted to control some of the strips seperately…is that possible with this method? would those strips simply go to a different channel?

    thank you again!

    • Arron Hartt says:

      Chris Ross,

      Yeah glad this has helped you! Yes so if you wanted to control each strip differently then it would just take buying another DMX Decoder for each strand.

  19. Luke says:

    Arron,
    Great job on this! I have a couple of questions.
    I have been able to get mine to work great, but I was wondering, you have it looks like groups of three pole with the LED tape light on them, are they all plugged into one DMX Decoder, or is each one its own DMX Decoder. Another words, did you use one DECODER for each group of three poles you have in the pictures above. I understand you used many DMX Decoders, but if you used three poles on one decoder, how did you connect them all? Since you only show one LED Tape light in your tutorial. Secondly, if you cut the tape, how did you reconnect the cut pieces to a DMX Decoder? Thanks for your help on this!

  20. Connor Bledsoe says:

    Question, did yall use the 150 or 300 led?

  21. Joel says:

    Hey how did you keep the bases from falling over? They look like they’d be unstable?

Leave a Reply to Arron Hartt Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.