Post #665564 by tikilongbeach on Wed, Jan 30, 2013 5:00 PM

On 2013-01-23 16:42, Hale Tiki wrote:
I'm looking into alternative lighting sources. I work with LED, neon, cold cathode, et cetera all the time, and am thinking of moving in that direction. Especially with all of the lighting I've done with RGB led's that allow you to change the light color. I was going to mention that later on, but since you asked, I'm more than happy to answer!

I'd rather stray away from conventional lighting. As much as I love the warm glow of an old incandescent bulb with a nice filament, there's a lot of bulb banning going on in different parts of the world, even here in the US. And although LED's certainly aren't the way of the future, they're the way of tomorrow. My current thought on the light source is to do 1 of two things.

1. RGB LED's. They're remote controlled, they're super bright, they can be dimmed, and they'll even do a purple/blue, which should react VERY well with the pigments in the chunks. I haven't done a test yet, as I spent my spare time today casting them. LED Blacklight isn't the same as traditional black light tubes. It gets pretty close, but has a lot more visible light output. For this application, however, I think it'll work just fine. I can also wire it to be plug in or hardwired, despite needing DC current.
2. Cold cathode/neon. I think I'm going to reserve this for single purpose lights. There's a purple "lava" tube that I get that kind of similar to a plasma ball, but not. It's hard to describe, and it doesn't output a lot of light, but mannnnnn does it look cool.

I'll have to try to get some photo/video.

Have you tried electroluminescent wire for any projects? Positives/negatives? I've been planning a volcano picture, but it doesn't seem that flowing EL wire comes in the volcano colors of red, yellow, white and orange.