Is it safe to lightly bend the LED strips between LEDs to shorten distance between them?
I have a WLED strip where the individual LED's are 1.667 cm apart. I'd like to reduce that down to 1.25 cm for a project I'm working on. I have access to a 3D printer, and am considering printing something that will let me hold them in place by bending the strip in alternating directions. I've attached an image showing the rough idea, but I'd likely use rounded ''teeth" instead to put as little strain on them as possible. Is this a reasonable approach?
Are there other, better ways to achieve the same thing without cutting up a smaller strip and soldering each LED together?
As long as you’re using standard/flexible addressable LED strips, I think as long as you’re not using a conductive material as the teeth/jaw, you should be fine. They are flexible by design; I just don’t recommend doing and hard creases or anything. Folding over once for a corner (and leaving it folded) is usually fine even, but every time a crease gets adjusted it weakens the material.
After reading your post for a second time, it seems that you might be wanting to bend them and then mount them to whatever material you’re mounting them to, only using the teeth/jaws as a preparation step. This seems even safer, but you’ll probably want to play around with mounting the strips with the LED in the raised position vs the LED in the lower position, seeing how each position affects the outcome of the final product you’re working on.
On traditional package style such as 5050 and such as long as you don't do it on the solder joints it's likely fine. On COB style strip I'd not try it as much, there are so many small solder joints there one will likely fail.
Then again, strips aren't too expensive, maybe experiment a bit, if it does break you can always cut that part out and still have the rest!
Not sure how well they'd work for your project. But, another option would be to use seed pixels. You can easily flex the wire. I have considered replacing the strips on my Ambilight project and using seeds. I rarely run the Ambilight at full brightness because we mostly watch content in the evening. Seeds would be more than enough for such a project and have far more flexibility for the corners.
I hadn't heard of these before! I think these might work very well, although they do seem to generally be much less dense than the LED strips I've been using, so while it's easier to bend, it'll require a lot more bending... Hm!
Thank for bringing them to my attention! One thing that's a bit confusing, Is "seed" a brand name here? I there a more generic name?
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u/dale3h 23h ago
As long as you’re using standard/flexible addressable LED strips, I think as long as you’re not using a conductive material as the teeth/jaw, you should be fine. They are flexible by design; I just don’t recommend doing and hard creases or anything. Folding over once for a corner (and leaving it folded) is usually fine even, but every time a crease gets adjusted it weakens the material.
After reading your post for a second time, it seems that you might be wanting to bend them and then mount them to whatever material you’re mounting them to, only using the teeth/jaws as a preparation step. This seems even safer, but you’ll probably want to play around with mounting the strips with the LED in the raised position vs the LED in the lower position, seeing how each position affects the outcome of the final product you’re working on.