Motion Activated Light Strip

While wandering around Aldi the other day, I spotted some $12.00 led motion activated light strips and decided they might come in handy.


Download the files here along with a 20x20 end cap https://www.dropbox.com/s/yo2dvalb0i9ncl8/2020%20end%20cap.zip?dl=0

I added another light tray for 10mm strips so it is about 30mm wide internally.

The original one suits 8mm wide strips.

I decided to place them somewhere on the crossbar on my CR-10 and took the obligatory measurements and committed a design to paper. 

I made a simple rectangular box to house the 8mm x 330mm pieces I cut down from the single 1m length of lights. I printed diagonally as it was decided to give the housing a final length of 360mm as it was a good size to fit on the bed and house the lights.

They fit comfortably, but I needed to figure out how to best route the wires.

A friend of mine Adz, inspired me through a close friend of his, Spiro, so I just ran it down and around the frame ;-D

I soldered the cut down strips together and am here to warn you about getting the domed clear covering hot, as it gets sticky AF and messy.

It will be mounted to the front of the cross bar so I trimmed down the silver trim on the printer to make room for the strip.

I modeled some T-Nuts about 12mm long to slide into the cross-bar to which the strip would be glued later.

I forgot to add some z-hop and ended up printing these 3 times as they kept getting knocked over lol

The T-Nuts slid into position. They were tight and hard to slide in, where the upright was attached to the cross-bar, but lose along the length of the bar ?? I think the screws joining the Aluminium together might be tight enough to be slightly squishing the bar.

To make this easy I used some spring clamps to hold a piece of thin MDF along the bottom of the bar to help with lining everything up. The idea was to place a drop of CA glue on each T-Nut and then sit the bar on that and just slide back and stick to the glue.

Tada !!!

Once the glue had set up I slid the bar out and hit it with some activator just to be sure :-)

The battery pack comes with some double sided tape so I mounted it on the bottom of the cross-bar and set it to come on automatically.

The silver warning tag really reflects the light which itself could be stronger but a battery power strip of lcds was never going to be really powerful.

Over all I'm quite happy with it and it comes on when I'm near or when the bed and print head are moving and turns itself off when it isn't.