Led-Strip Blade with 4 Strips, Diffusion, comparison, general review

[erazer]

Hey guys,
some weeks are over now since I started my blade-building projects. It was lots of fun, but of course partly horribly frustrating to some degree too, I tried alot of diffusion materials, different PVC types and my goal was nothing less than building the brightest LED-Strip Blade ever seen.
So of course I was into going for 3 strips at least until I found a shop that had an acrylic fourangled rod 8mm where i could install 4 sk 6812 strips onto.
After some fails I really accomplished to get it running with the tcss v2 11pins connector and a 30 amps unprotected 3120mah 18650.
There were two seconds I was so proud to watch it lighting up but after that i was instantly disappointed as ..ing hell..
No way to diffuse it properly without heavy corncobbing to a degree where I had to get so much more diffusing material that it was much dimmer than any of my 2 strip blades so that the whole project was dead for me.
The point is: even with the same diffusion material of my 2 strip-blades, which are really sophisticated near to perfection meanwhile I can say proudly, that 4-strip blade with that bad corncobbing wasnt even much brighter to the human eye.
So, if you wanna build a stupid bright blade I can tell u ALL: forget about more strips or going for adafruits instead of chinese ones... IT´S ALL ABOUT DIFFUSING YOUR 2 STRIPS.
Original adafruits wont be brighter than cheap ones, as long as they work at all..just more reliable
Forget the W2182bs, these 11 or 12 mms will always give u some kind of shadow at least in comparison to the 7.5 mm sk 6812s.

In terms of diffusion I can tell you all, and I can´t stress enough: TCSS did a FCKN AWESOME JOB on these plastic diffusors and foam-diffuser-tubes. I tried so many different things, of course all mixed into different variations, from toilet paper to clear package tape, christmas-gift clear-foil, cellophane, tcss corbin film, 1mm package foam, 2mm package foam, TCSS foam, heatshrinks, special LED-enhancing fckn expensive scotch tapes.
The closest you can get to a blade without shadowzones and without corncobbing and still as bright as possible is to glue a strip of doublesided 6mm clear tape onto both sides of the doublestrips, straight over the 5mm lightemitting sections, then you glue a selfcut 6mm strip package foam onto these. Then you wrap that into 4 to 5 layers of clear package tape and put this into the foam diffuser from the TCSS shop, try to get a snug-fit, if not go for more layers of tape.

After that it´s up to you: you can either wrap that foam now into 4 layers of clear package tape again for a snug-fit and put it into a transwhite thickwalled blade, so you dont need the plastic diffuser and you will have a perfectly even lit transwhite duelready blade. Yes, trust the transwhites, they do a nice diffuserjob there. But not the thinwalleds unfortunately.
Or you put the foam diffuser into the plastic diffuser and get it into a photon or clear blade and you are good to go without shadow zones or any corncobbing.

At last I have to say: I am a bit disappointed by these photonic tubes. It´s not only that I don´t like that light-in-a-tube-look, I clearly love these transwhite thickwalled blades most, they give that perfectly even-lit look and make the blade look fuller. Also you can drill out a white tip with a hand-dremel so that it´s lit with the last pixel in it and it looks the same as the blade, lit or unlit.
It´s just... that photon doesn´t make it so much brighter as many postulate it. It has a nice color on blue only, a very unique green, but with green and blue together it won´t be so much brighter at all, so don´t be too disappointed if you go for the photonic-strip blade. There´s a great difference in having more lumen on a blade and seeing it with human eyes.
Not to be able to have all colours going that a prizm 5.1 offers you is not worth that marginal clue of more brightness to that photon-blade, sorry to say. >overhyped

Sorry, I don´t have photos or videos on this but I can guarantee you that it won´t help anyhow, a blade on camera and in real is just too much difference to tell anyone which one is brighter or more evenly diffused, you simply cant recognize it if it´s about the last fine corrections for perfection.

I hope I could help some of you with enthusiastic projects on blade-builds, may the force and brightness be with You