USB room lights/cathodes?

Vegeta

Vegeta

Vegeta

Soldato
Joined
6 Nov 2004
Posts
5,778
Hi, I want to light up the back of my desk via a USB device, i've been looking around the web and the only thing I can seem to find is small USB lights - these would be ideal but i'm guessing their not powerful enough to provide sufficient light, is there any product out there that I can put into USB ports and get a lot of light out of to light up the back of my desk?
 
i was looking round OcUk's modding section earlier and they have some external lights and EL string, try looking in there.

edit - Sunbeam SL-R Strobe Light - Red (CM-050-SB)
 
Yeah i was conned by this stuff aswell, so I bought some of it - it produces no light at all - just lights up enough to see a small line of blue.
 
Ohh right sorry havent tried one of those, how could I use this via usb? Is it possible? What kind of light does it give out says its red?
 
hmm i just got some of that EL String stuff too
doesn't seem to give much light at all
and the inverter is giving a really loud and high pitch noise
is this normal??
whats are the chances of returning it?
 
Ive just finished an art piece in my room, which ive mounted to a mdf board which is offset from the wall and mounted a cold cathode behind. I simply used a normal pc cold cathode and soldered a couple of molex plugs to some wires so that the power lead is removable. I also removed the switch from the pci backplate and mounted that at the bottom of the board for easy access. The thing is wired up to my server as the server is on 24hours a day.
 
Have you put anything around the molex cables to stop them being pulled or hoovered?

Hoovering over a live molex cable does not do the PSU any good usually :D
 
Hoover? I don't usually hoover my walls, lol :p The way ive done it, is to attatch a female molex to the art piece, then two male molex plugs to each end of a piece of thin two core speaker cable, which is routed through a pci plate into my server. This allows the female molex to be glued flush to the back of the board, near the switch. The power cable can then be removed if I ever need to move the art piece. I did toy with the idea of hiding a microphone and webcam behind there as well, and have it as some sort of hidden surveilance thing.

Edit; To answer your post, nope I havent wrapped anything around the molex plugs. I suppose I could put heatshrink tubing around them if I could be bothered. But they seems strong enough by simmply soldering the cable to the molex pins and reinserting them into the molex plug.
 
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Fear my oh so 1337 camera! :( Thses pictures really arnt good at showing what the light looks like at all. If I remember I might steal my dads camera tommorow and try and get some decent photos taken.

p1010031b6gd.jpg

p1010036b7qf.jpg
 
Cheers Yewen :) Cost me enough in the end; 1 pack of decent thick matt paper, 1 black ink cartridge, 3 tins of black spray paint, 1 small pot of black paint(After the spray paint didnt work at all), 1 board of Mdf, 1 length of wodden batton(for bracket) and 1 cold cathode. Im quite pleased wit the result though.
 
Yeah, I was going to do it in Rastobator, but in the end I just printed it directly from Adobe Illustrator, as I wanted to keep the crisp lines. As for the cold cathode, I might end up mounting another one behind, to give out more light. That should be easy enough as there is a spare plug off the inverter thats mounted at the back. At the moment ive got the one cathode mounted horizontally in the centre, but i might try moving that one further down and have the other one mounted vertically at the centre, so that it gives off more light to the sides.
 
Ive done something similar, ive put 2 cathodes under a shelf that my monitor sits on. I did it to light up my keyboard at night and it works a treat. I was going to use a power adapter but decided to plug it into my pc via a rear pci molex plug thingy. Ill post some pics later if anyone is interested

Mark
 
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