Stage Designs

Checker Board

Luke Howard and Stage Light Company for First Baptist Church of Opelika in Opelika, AL brings us this great stage design. (originally posted March 2015)

Taking inspiration from Checkered Dots and taking into consideration the theme of community, Luke designed a stage using groups or “communities” of LED Pixels. He also wanted to add in some sort of blinder. This was where work lights came into place.

They built out a 14’ x 12’ wall. They cut 2” holes for the back side of the work light to sit in. Cutting a 10” hole into plywood was extremely difficult. After trying 1 test template, they opted for this option.

The first design Luke did of this set required LED Tape being mounted behind holes being cut into the front plywood similar to Checkered Dots. After more research, he came across 45mm LED Pixels. Using a chip-based LED Pixel came out to be more expensive than using basic RGB LED Tape, however it would be easier to install since they would not have to cut out holes across each panel or worry about mounting the tape behind each section. These pixels also gave them the opportunity in the future to create a permanent pixel wall somewhere in their youth space. Even though there was the ability to control each pixel, they opted to have control of each 4 x 4 section of pixels due to control channel limitations. Luke built out a template using CAD drawings to define spacing for each pixel in the 2 x 2 square. Then out of Coroplast, he cut holes where each pixel should be screwed in. Using a paint pen and some clever tricks, they marked each hole onto the black wall. Each pixel had 4 holes to screw in, they only screwed each ball in using 2 screws. This still came out to be 720 screws.

They wrapped each light bulb with painter’s tape only exposing the top and then took silver heat resistant spray paint and painted each bulb. This allowed for the bulbs to not be overwhelming and gave the aluminum a nice glow on the work lights.

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Curved Panels Pixel Words

5 responses to “Checker Board”

  1. Gary Brownell says:

    Great job! What is cool is that there are so many creative options and different materials to achieve a similar look. Thanks for giving props on the inspiration.

  2. Kyle Dickson says:

    Are those work lights with 8.5 inch reflectors or 10 inch reflectors?

  3. Danny Lopez says:

    Hmmm, nice set! Quick question, that LED strip DMX decoder thing that is in the picture that you are holding, where can I buy that?

  4. Luke Howard says:

    Kyle- They are 10″. At first I spec’d out 8.5″ but am glad we went with 10″. The larger aluminum circle helped spread the light with the aluminum tip’d bulbs.

    Danny- they were custom built for me based on the chip and the requirement to control them as 1 unit or as pixels based on the dip switch configuration. It was an eBay site yuryshef I believe is the username. They came out of Israel.

  5. Rotimi Babs says:

    This is awesome Luke. Please can you send the exact url of the guys in Israel that custom built that dip controller for you? I need a custom solution just like that for a project. thanks in advance

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