As requested, I’m reposting this here. It was buried in the comments of my last post.
This is a ~19" round “Tiny Whoop” micro drone race gate. I made it from a 5 ft section of white 3/4" PEX pipe bent into a circle, with a white 3D printed tee holding the ends together. I just slowly worked and bent a straight section of pipe into a circle. I think gently heating it with a heat gun or blow dryer in a well ventilated area would probably help make it easier, and make it hold its shape better. As it is, there’s quite a bit of tension on the tee.
I used 1/4" thick strips of FloraCraft foam to keep the LED strip centered in the middle of the pipe, and to help with diffusion. It fit 92 LEDs from a 2 meter strip of 60 LEDs per meter. I used a thin 4mm strip of LEDs on this one, and it does seem to allow more light to bounce around to the outside, but even the 10mm wide strips that I used in other gates look good. I fed a piece of wire through the pipe, then wrapped that around the wired on the end of the LED strip. Then I put a foam strip on the front and back of the strip, then push fed it into the pipe until it got too snug and started crushing the foam (about half-way through the pipe). Then I pushed on the LEDs and foam while pulling the wires from the other end, which really helped. I would stop and add another strip of foam on the front and back when I reached the end of the last one.
The pattern is Fire2012WithPalette, slightly modified to run independent heat maps up each side. Code is here: https://github.com/jasoncoon/rgb-led-race-gate
I’ve made a few gates using Pro Trinket 5V, but this one is using a cheap 5V Nano v3 clone. The shield I designed and used for the Trinket is up on my Tindie store, and I should have the Nano version available soon. There’s no level shifter required, so there’s not much to them. Just a couple of push buttons and a resistor, really, and they’re easy enough to wire up on a perma-proto board.
The 3D printed elbow, tee, flange, and Trinket case I designed and used are available here: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3200653 I should have a case for the Nano added on there soon as well. You can, of course, use regular PEX fittings from the store, but they only had them in black.
There’s a bit more information here: https://www.evilgeniuslabs.org/trinket-pro-rgb-led-micro-quadrotor-race-gate
