How strong are people finding the various LED strips available?
Work are putting together a show stand and want to try tensioned LED strips connecting bits of the stand to visualise data flowing around. Has anyone tried stretching the typical “rectangular silicone tube” strips from point to point?
Can they go reasonably straight over a distance of a couple of meters or does that generally kill them?
Otherwise I suppose two strips could be glued back to back around some wire cable or something… all ideas welcome
I have no experience with such a design, but my initial thought is it might be bad for the various solder joints if things are being stretched. Two meters sounds pretty far for an unsupported strip and it would need to be stretched pretty tight to be straight unless it was hanging vertically.
Your idea of stretching cable or thin rope could be good, but it might be problematic if the LED strip twists around it causing the pixels to face the wrong direction. Using two LED strips back to back could partially solve that and you could even purposely (artistically) put several twists into the stretch while going from point A to point B. Of course using two strips would double your costs in multiple ways: led strips, Amps to power it, time to solder wires, controller memory (unless you split/duplicate the data signal).
Maybe experiment with stretching two parallel cables or thin ropes spaced apart by the width of the LED strip. Should mostly prevent the twisting, but attaching the strip would still need to be sorted out.
