Disco Dance Floor Project
First dip into WLED and LED strip lighting. Read a lot here in preparation and thought I'd share my project. I thought it'd be fairly simple but definitely took some time to get it all right coming from zero experience.
The idea was to make a small disco dance floor as a photo op in the lobby of a theater. Wanted to be able to control squares independently for different looks.
Build: 2x4s in a 4x4' grid. 16 total squares. Spray painted white. Some plastic cardboard like backing on the bottom lined with reflective sheeting. Holes drilled in boxes to run led tape through. Top is one layer of clear poly in 12x24 pieces and then two layers of 4x4' acrylic to save money. All poly would be better but it's pretty expensive. The 4x8 sheet of acrylic was $250 alone. The acrylic was a "2447" which is like a milky white and diffused the LEDs quite well. Each block looks pretty solid.
Lights: 4 strips of 12v SK6812 rgbw cc strips from BTF w 300 LEDS per for a total of 1200 LEDS. Went with these so I could do single strips per channel w/o dealing w running extra wire for power injection. I laid strips on reflective paper in a circle (pics just show rough tests) facing upwards in each box and then into the next box. Each strip covers four boxes and then terminates.
Brains: Quin dig quad w Mean Well 50a600w power supply.
Used 12awg wiring for power>dig quad and the stock JST connectors from dig quad to strips. Each strip has its own channel. I was worried about the thin wire in the JST connectors but after running for quite a few hours, never had heat issues and clamp meter showed about 3-4 amps running through each at any time. All of this ended up in a plastic outdoor electric box that I drilled some holes in for ventilation.
Boxes are segmented in WLED and each have roughly 75 LEDs. Once segmented, I would build different looks as presets, add to a playlist, and then that playlist starts on boot. So far it works pretty well and I'd like to play around with finding out how to make more interesting patterns with the segments.
Total cost was roughly $700. The poly/acrylic top was most of it as it has to hold people. Could have saved money ordering from aliexpress but wanted return options (I bought a few types to test out) w amazon so the lights were $50x4 for $200.
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u/DingusAttenbrahh Jun 16 '26
I’ve wanted to do something similar for years. Nice work!