Anyone had any experience with lighting their models with coloured LEDs?

[peanutismint]

I'm 3D printing a architectural model of a building that in real life is lit up at night with big coloured flood lights. I'd like to replicate this by having some lighting shine onto the outside of my model, ideally two separate colours.

I'm wondering what the best way to achieve this would be? I've seen those long rolls of RGBW LED lighting strips, which look like they'd be perfect, but I only need literally 3 or 4 LEDs rather than the whole strip, and then some way to both power them and set their individual colours, and that's where I run into problems.... There must be an easy way out there of getting two or more colours out of a few LEDs without having to buy two complete sets of LEDs, controller boxes and remotes to set the colours?

I guess the old-fashioned method would just be to buy white or 'tungsten' colour LEDs and stick some kind of lighting gel on top of them, but this seems a little jury-rigged and I'm hoping there's a better way out there.....??

 

[Jimw100]

You could try neopixels. They are programmable RGB leds.

Breadboard-friendly RGB Smart NeoPixel - Pack of 4

you would need some sort of arduino control board to tell each LED to switch on and what color it should be. And you’d have to write the program (script) which gives those instructions, but that shouldn’t be difficult if all you want to do is make them switch on and stay one color.

 

[3Dsf]

It's really easy and cheap to use a children's educational microcontroller to drive programmable LEDs.

Lighting models V: Controlling and automating LEDs - 3dsf.info

Useful information covering awesome science fiction and model making stuff.

sites.google.com

 

[swgeek]

You can paint the LEDs with translucent paint.

 

[ID10T]

If it’s only two colors, bi-color LEDs are not expensive. You put power to one of each pin to activate that color. Can be done simply with an on-off-on switch.

But if you want animation, that’s were you need to go deeper.

I found some great ones that change color randomly, but I don’t think they’d be suitable for you.

 

[peanutismint]

Thanks all, I went with NeoPixels from Adafruit and an ESP8266 microcontroller running WLED!