Flexible light pipes (For indicators)

Archive New Product Ideas
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The latest new product post reminded me of a product my company uses in our enclosures.

And I use the 1mm jacketed core lightpipes on personal projects all the time now.

It is a low-cost light pipe that lets you channel LED light to a new indicator location.

I found in small quantities it cost far less to use these then a panel mount LEDs or a separate PCB.

They also are RF transparent and won’t contribute to EMI in wireless projects.

They have mounts for different LEDs including surface mount, and a few different lenses. Although I often use the light pipe without a lens to get a tiny point light. (epoxying them directly into a wood enclosure looks very cool)

The light pipes come in kits, pre-cut lengths, and small quantities.

It would be a perfect product for Sparkfun to carry

http://i-fiberoptics.com/summary-info.php?id=97

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ZapWizard:
Although I often use the light pipe without a lens to get a tiny point light. (epoxying them directly into a wood enclosure looks very cool)

Oh, that takes me back… as a kid, I used to build model spaceships where the “windows” were illuminated by bare 1mm fiber-optic strands. You’d poke each strand through a 1mm hole, then touch the tip of the soldering iron to the end of the fiber to spread it out into a little lens you could glue in place. (Some of the old “Star Trek” models came with lighting rigs that worked this way.)

You just gave me an idea to try doing that with the holes in the pentagonal breadboards SparkFun sells, to make a sparkly dodecahedron…