I wanted to make some nice clouds with backlightning for my kids room, however everything I found online was not up to my expectations, so naturally I went for the DIY approach :)
First… where to find anything that looks like clouds. I found someone online selling wooden shelves with the backside shaped like clouds, so I reached out and asked only for the ‘cloud’ part and I got 3 very nice different clouds!
I got a 12V simple RGB LED strip (14.4W/m), because I’ve cut it to be super short I had hoped that it wouldn’t consume that much power, but it still took .5 amps (~6W)! Hungry hungry hippo..
So the initial idea was to use 18650 batteries (3.7V) and use a simple 12V LED strip and I bought a charger and 6 batteries, they did work great initially but.. for a week the Shelly RGBW2 device I had to controll the LED strip drained the battery (althou it only drained about ~2 mA..) and I didn’t realize that.. which just destroyed the chemistry of 2 of those batteries, so I decided to abandon that path. Another downside was the battery pack was pretty thik, so the clouds stays weird on the wall. The solution was simpler - 12V DC power source and some cables that I masked with cable canal on the wall and the same paint I painted the wall :-D
This is how it rawly looked without the battery holders:
I got to mounting on the wall and this is the result:
Added some decorations as well:
