LED Lattice

Ron Menees from Real Life Church in Millbrook, AL brings us this LED tape structure.

From Ron: We started out wanting a design that had multiple designs in it that we could use to create multiple shows. We started out in a 3-D design program and laid it out.

We used over 40 2×4’s. We cut the 2×4’s down to 6 foot, and then we notched the side of the 2×4 at 2” piece on both sides with a 1” channel. All the 2×4’s were notched on the ends and in the middle to give us a seamless look on the ends and where they connect.

Then putting the structure together we used wood glue and screws along with brackets that we had made on the back to help give it support and strength. We hung it on the back wall using all struts and U-boats so it was a floating structure about 4 inches off the stage wall.

We used 2 electrical boxes that we made that housed 3 / 24 channel decoders in each one along with 3 power supplies. We left all three sides of the box open to allow air to flow and put a 1×4 on the front to hide everything and mounted them in the ceiling above the structure.

We used RGB LED tape light – 12 rolls – and soldered all of our connections to make sure we had a good connection, over 550 soldering points, that took us roughly 3 days to do. We hot glued the lights in to each channel, and ran the wire through a hole we drilled at one end to the back.

We are running the decoders through Show Express lighting software to give us all of our lighting effects. The hole project took us 14 days over 3 weeks, and we spent around $1600 on everything.