I spent some time playing around with 3D printed bezels again - this time, printing the diffuser as well as the bezel. You can see the results: no bezel/diffuser (top), white bezel/white diffuser (middle), black bezel/white diffuser (bottom). You lose some brightness with the black bezel, but the overall effect is much better because it really kills the light bleeding.
The diffuser is a single layer of 0.2mm white PLA+. The bezel (square cells) is printed directly on top of the diffuser layer. For white/white, it's just a single print, but to get the black bezel on a white diffuser, I had to make two separate-gcode files, and swap filament in between printing them. It's a little bit of a pain, but the result works pretty well.
Here, I'm purging any white filament from the hotend after printing the diffuser layer and loading the black filament:
Next, I run the bezel g-code to construct the cells right on top of the diffuser:
The result is a single piece which fits over the 0603 LEDs (on 0.1" centers):
Like the previous experiments with 3D printed bezels at this scale, normal slicers just don't cut it :-) I had to generate the g-code to print these using a python program. After you get started, though, it's pretty cool what you can do by putting down a few hundred microns of plastic exactly where you want it.
I think I'm going to expand the code to add brackets to mount the bezel to the PCB holes. More python -> more g-code -> more melted plastic.
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I like the "bloom" effect of the white/white bezel.
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in person, it looks like a defocused analog oscilloscope - but there's no focus knob!
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Yeah, looks like the old phosphor screens... Btw, I've used your VEML7700 arduino library, and it's been nice to have. Thanks for coding that up!
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Are you doing "Life" on that display ;)
That's a really impressive diffuser/bezel result.
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yep, it's life
https://youtu.be/u26hTV89_7Y
The diffuser works great, but in bright light, the contrast isn't ideal since the white diffuser reflects a lot of ambient light. I'm going to try to print the whole assembly on top of a green filter next. If the print will stick to it, that should improve the contrast.
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