Element light

thingiverse

I was in Ikea one Saturday with the intention of buying one specific item and, as always happens there, I saw something else that made me think "I wonder what I can do with that".In this case it was the Vattensten LED light strip (https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/vattensten-led-lighting-strip-white-60530596), which was being sold for just a fiver, so I picked one up. It's a USB powered LED strip about 100cm long with a self-adhesive backing.I eventually decided to try and use it as part of a wall light, so I set about putting together a design in Blender. I didn't want the LEDs to shine directly into the room, as this can be a bit harsh, so instead decided to bounce the light off a white reflector to give a much gentler effect.The holder for the LED strip ended up looking like a heating element, so the thing now had a name.I printed the parts using black PLA for the element, and white for the reflector. They were printed on an Ender-3 S1 Plus which has a 30cm bed, but I still needed to turn the parts 45 degrees to get them to fit.Once the element part had been printed, I painted the inside of the track white to reflect the light coming from the LEDs, which were fixed using the self-adhesive strip to the outer edge of the part (the edge that doesn't have post supports).The amount of light it produces is not enormous, but it's enough to cut through the darkness and add a relaxed atmosphere to the room of an evening.Ikea also do a multi-colour version of Vattensten for a couple of quid more, which should also work assuming the power connector will fit through the hole in the reflector.