So I’m looking for something like these. Clear lenses that snap onto the top of 5050 SMDs. They reign in the extreme 120 degree spread to 60 or 30 degrees.
The lenses in the link are too expensive, and a pretty exhaustive search on aliexpress only turned up one vendor with a diffused variant.
Does anyone have any ideas as to where I can get these at a reasonable price? Please and thank you!
http://www.exledusa.com/exled-clip-lens-for-smd-5050-led-10-x-lens.html
@Ashley_M_Kirchner_No Similar to that. Those are the diffused ones I mentioned earlier. I don’t really like that they have legs instead of snapping on either. My project uses the 144 per meter strip of ws2812b’s so the space between them is tight.
Ah. You may be looking at custom work then …
Yeah… it’s a tight squeeze. And I really need to get a set of calipers to measure how tight a squeeze it is!
While I have your attention, @Ashley_M_Kirchner_No , I think I’m going to design a high density pcb stick like you did, but for the ws2812b’s. While I’m getting better at soldering the 144/per meter strips together, it’s really hard.
Any lessons learned advice for me?
If you’re going to do that, you’re going to want to reflow the stick as opposed to hand soldering the individual LEDs. Putting the capacitors on the same side as the LED makes it easier as you can reflow everything in one shot, but they end up visible. Putting them on the other side is an option, but then you have to manually reflow them with a hot air station, risking damaging the LEDs on the other side since you are now reheating the PCB … I may already have a design for the 2812s, I need to look.
Just measured them - the WS2812B 144s are 22mm between 5050s.
Thank you @Mike_Thornbury . That means the clear caps in the link above will easily fit on every other light.