Hey!! Like lots of teams, we have giant numbers we wave in the stands at our competitions. Ours are just corrugated plastic and not super interesting,. We’d like to level up to lighted ones this year but are curious how other teams do it. We’re assuming LED but how are they powered? Any ideas or suggestions would be helpful. Thanks!!
One of our team parents built us a set a few years ago, which we still use. Here’s his documentation of what he did to make them. And here’s a picture of them in use:
The lights will do a steady on mode, a blink mode, and a synchronized mode where the numbers turn on in sequence, then flash together. You could do almost any pattern you can program.
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Thanks for this! Do you know what materials the numbers are made out of and what kind of LED’s they use?
Not same guide but a few concrete links…
12v worth of AA batteries:
https://www.amazon.com/LAMPVPATH-Battery-Holder-Leads-Double-batteries/dp/B07KVHMQRH/
LED’s
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=12+v+neon+led+strip
I like the NEON strip style. You could get by with not doing the microcontroller things to make them blinky.
Backing material… anything light and stiff enough? I’ve seen pink insulation foam (wrapped in duct tape), plywood, foam core board. Personally I’d just swing by the local big-box hardware store or craft store to see what you like. The tradeoff is just between cost/robustness/stiffness/weight
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We used thin birch plywood for the backing, since the electronic components (controller unit, battery box, LEDs) are attached to the backing with bolts and screw-on clips (for the LEDs.) I’m afraid I don’t know which LEDs he used specifically, but they look just like the ones @gerthworm linked to above (in the “warm white” color, which is kind of yellow-orange and fits our team colors.) We use 10 rechargeable AA batteries per number and have this great charger case for them. We take that back to the hotel at night to recharge them for the next day when we’re at a competition. They’ll last a whole day, but not two or three without recharging.
Here are closeups of the front and back of one of the numbers to give you a better idea of how they’re put together:
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Our team used a Glowforge to cut two of each number out, leaving space between for fairy lights. We spray painted the outside our team’s colors and the inside an iridescent grey so the lights would glow more.
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6 and 5 years ago, we went as LED stick figures for Halloween and each costume was driven from a single 18650, had between 50 and 70 individual LEDs (SK6812 ARGB) and each lasted easily the full night of fun, so that’s another option.
Several micros can run directly off a single 18650 without any voltage regulation and you’d pretty surely get a full day of lighted goodness from it, then could charge in the hotel or at home for the next day. The costumes used an Arduino nano [clone] with an AVR 328P and they were entirely voltage tolerant of 4V2 to start all the way down well in the mid 3s. I used a cheap IR sensor as the input device to configure and switch among the various modes.
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