Post #795677 by leevigraham on Sat, Jun 15, 2019 7:51 AM

Hi all,

The build has continued and it's time for an update!

The last four months have focussed on lighting and finishing off the bar and shelves.

LED Lighting

Oh man have I learnt a lot about led lighting.

Luckily I have a friend who is crazy about christmas lights who helped me out with some hardware and a lot of advice.

I started with a 2x 5m 5v programmable led strips, a Raspberry Pi and a RPI-28D lighting controller which runs Falcon Player. I'll eventually be using xLights for light sequencing and show scheduling

First pass was to test the strips in my bedroom.

Here's a short video of the lamp testing.

Next test was to move the strip into the bar. I looped it over the top and ran a simple rainbow pattern (video).

Then I tested adding a short strip to the shelving.

Once I was confident with the electronics (I fried a few leds getting the voltage wrong), I took the shelves off and added strip to each individual shelf.

It was a real challenge to keep the voltage up over the whole strip length. The shelves have 420 leds… all individually programmable. I ended up injecting power for each stack of shelves.

Here's a video of a test sequence.

I also started experimenting with a fire sequence. Here's a video of testing xLights and the result

Eventually I got the shelves back on the wall:

and then I enjoyed a Mai Tai

Research

I was lucky enough to head to the UK for a month where I visited Trader Vics and The British Museum. Of course I had to try a Mai Tai and a Suffering Bastard.

I maxed out my duty free limit on J.Wray and Nephew OP.

Back home in Aus

I ordered a Tiki Dylan mug before I left and it arrived while I was away.

It goes perfectly with my other Tiki Dylan mug

I've started to collect a few different lights for the ceiling

including making my own glass float (I bought 8 bowls from a local website)

With so many moving parts I knuckled down and finished the bar top. I used a japan black stain and couple coats of varnish to add some protection. I also added trim to the front of the shelves.

While I had the stain out I ran a couple of tests on a few spare pieces of bamboo.

It's all coming together

The last step to finish off the bar and lighting was to add under bar lighting.

Pushing the rainbow for testing…

Here's a video of the fire effect and one of a reveal effect

Next steps

Now the base of the lighting is done i'm going to start working on the ceiling lighting. Stay tuned!

---

My TikiBar build: Leroys Luau Lounge
Instagram

[ Edited by: leevigraham 2019-06-15 07:58 ]