LED Wiring

With the new LED light devices, there is a lot more flexibility on how to put the wiring in place.  There are two major types of placement.  Either in the ceiling to light a room or on the floor for up-lighting.  

Originally this is how I have been wiring LEDs into the MOCs.  All of this wiring is the 30 gauge wire from Amazon (see here for information on wiring).  Keeping the wire in place is the first requirement.  You do not want the wire to fall down.  This 30 gauge wire with a silicone jacket is more likely to stay in the grooves than the smaller/bigger wire.  But crossing a plate joint will cause problems.  The issue with using regular plates as in the pictures above, is that all the space is taken up up by the stud and the plate portion of the 1x2 plate.

Here I have used round 1x1 plates.  There exists a small gap that is large enough for two wires to go through. The picture below provides a better view of this.  Since it is very difficult to see these, the choice of color is not important.  If they can be seen, then we need to try something else.

Hiding wiring can be a challenge.  Then I asked how would you hide wiring in a real building.  You put it into the walls or if that is not possible, the wire is placed in conduit.  That gave me an idea of how to construct conduit in LEGO.

On the right side of this picture you can see the start of an idea, by using these modified plates with a pin hole.  In this picture I am only using these to guide the wire, but you could have placed then next to each other to form a continuous path.  What is missing here is how to make the turn.

This picture shows two plates side by side forming a continuous path for the wire

Finally this picture shows conduit running down the height of the building.  This is my first attempt at this modeling technique.  The short run on the left is design I leaning towards.  Light bluish gray round pin connector in 2L and 1L supported by the dark bluish gray plate with pin hole.  The longer run on the right was built out of parts I had on hand.  The ideal length between plate holders is 2L-!L-2L.  What is now entirely obvious is that modeling conduit has to be part of the building design ( as it is in real life).  Going back and modifying is difficult, since the plate holders have to be a certain distance apart for this modeling technique to work.

In another installation type, I made a light bar of sorts.  Using a 1x10 plate, I mounted a LED 1x1 on either end using super glue.  Then the wiring is run between the two LED 1x1 devices and finally a set of wires off of the left end.  As discussed earlier, this 30 gauge silicone wire will probably stay in place unless the wire is pulled.  Since the wire between the two ends does not go out side of the plate, there is no stress on it.  You could put 1x1 plates in the tubes, but they will only go half way across the wire laying in the trough.  This is probably good enough, unless there is considerable stress on the wire.

Now I can place this just about anywhere

These are but a few ideas.  I am looking for a more generic type of conduit.  There are several flexible hoses that might work, which would also provide a right angle turn feature.  More later.