Mini Lanterns and Shades for LEDs

Overview

I'm starting a small collection of 3d printed shades, lanterns, and more for your LEDs. Hopefully these help you spruce up your lighting game and control how the light diffuses in whatever environments you create.

If you have any creative ideas to add on to this, you can always remix the design, and if you have any requests for specific housings, just let me know what they are in the comments.

Printing

I printed most of these at 0.2mm standard settings with PLA, although some may benefit from a more detailed layer height.

It is very important to notice that every type of filament lets a different amount of light transmit through walls/layers. For example, the dark grey filament in the pictures lets almost no light through, whereas the white filament lets a bunch of light through. Use this to your advantage and create layer swaps to control where you want light to pass through and what color you want it to be (most of the bodies are 0.8mm-1.2mm thick for 2-3 standard 0.4mm walls).

I had a few problems here and there with bed adhesion, due to there being very little surface area contact on the print bed. So, if you have the same issue, I would definitely recommend printing with a brim. If you have problem with drooping or warping, it might also help to slow down the print speed a bit.

Test out the reference cylinder housing to make sure the LEDs you are using properly press-fit with your printer's tolerances. If they don't, either use something like a drill to open up the hole a bit, use plyers to add a bit more pressure, pick up a drill to widen the holes a little bit, or just pull the model into another software and make the diameter ever so slightly larger (for reference, the current opening diameter in CAD is 5.05mm with a larger lip at 6mm diameter for the top of the LED). If you need to hole to be smaller, just use a dab of hot glue or something to that effect.

Thanks for stopping by and happy printing 😁