Light bit of repair

Note how most of the LED's have stopped working

There was a single row of leds mounted under the gantry on my laser cutter, over the years the LED's have slowly stopped working and they were in a bit of a sorry state. I'm going to be installing a new camera into my laser cutter at some point and lighting is always important so it was a good time for an upgrade. Instead of one strip of light that moves and creates ever changing lighting I thought it would be better to put two static strips one the Y rails.

Removing the 24V wire from the loom up to the gantry

The old strip lights are pretty disgusting from years of cutting

I pulled the LED strip off the bottom of the gantry, it was pretty badly stained from years of laser cutting. The new lights are weatherproof, silicone coated so they should stay cleaner and functional for a lot longer. They are wired into the existing switch so they can be turned on and off from the outside of the machine.

The new lights are wired into the existing switch

A quick test of the new lights to confirm they take less than 1A

The existing power supply is only rated for 1A at 24V so it was worth taking a few seconds testing the lights to make sure they didn't draw too much current. In hindsight I would have made the strips slightly shorter (less bright and less current).

Drilling a new hole to run the wiring through

The left wiring is fed into the loom alongside the flow sensor

I had to drill a new hole to route the wires on the left hand side of the machine. I used a step drill bit to ensure there were no sharp edges to the hole when I was pulling the wire through. The wires were then routed down the back of the laser and alongside the water sensor wires

Silicone covered lights held down at the ends with gaffa tape

The right hand light feeds through the limit switch hole

The strips have a self adhesive backing but where the ends were terminated with heat shrink they weren't sticking to the rails. Liberal use of super sticky gaffa tape holds the ends down. The new lights are super shiny and provide a nice even light across the entire surface (or at least to the human eye they do, no doubt they'll give massive bright patches on the new camera but that's a future problem).

The new lights in all their shiny glory