Hey there,
I just wanted to share my "work in progress" setup for a curved PC monitor.
The main reason I share is that I was thinking about a lot of different ways of creating a LED bearing frame before I came up with the solution I finally went with. So maybe this provides some valuable input for thos who are thinking about doing the same.
I didn't want to tape the LEDs just to the back of the monitor. Of course this would have been the most easy way to go as I'm using a 34" curved monitor. Somehow that just didn't feel right and I guess I couldn't have looked at the back of my montitor for too long. (Because thats what they are there for, right? :D)
So I was thinking about creating a jig for bending a frame or ways to create a frame from a lot of different straight pieces. Finally this is what I came up and went with:
It worked really well up to this point. The frame consists of
- 15 mm x 15 mm x 1 mm aluminium square tubes
- 15 mm x 2 mm aluminium flat sections
- some 2 mm thick stainless wire and wire clamps
- self made plastic pieces to screw everything together (no glueing involved)
Next up is putting on LEDs and start wiring. I'll update this post with the finished setup. But again, my main intention was sharing the frame. Unfortunately my LED strip didn't come with adhesive tape attached. I'm thinking about using a lot of very short strips of heat shrinking tube to affix it to the frame. But the decision is not made yet.
The LED control is done by an Arduino Uno (clone) as a powerful CPU is already available. It's quite similar to my TV Setup, which is based on a HTPC and an Ardunio as well. The arduino is mounted on some kind of tray inside the PC enclosure.
A nice feature of the (otherwise pretty expensive) setups using PCs is pwoer for driving the LEDs can be drawn from the 5V rails of the ATX power supply unit.
Kind regards