LED Light Box Made From Acrylic and 3D Printing Plastic

In this project, you can create a small 3D printed lamp, that will light up a piece of acrylic with your custom design on it. this project is fairly easy to make, and should take to long it you are dedicated enough. This project does require two machines, a laser engraver for the Acrylic, and a 3D printer for the box itself.

Materials you need are going to be,

PLA filament

Acrylic

a switch

a power supply

and cables

for the equipment you will need

a 3D printer

a laser engraver

12V power supply

12V LED light strip

and measuring tools

Using google draw, create or choose a design using an image, depending on the design you chose, this could be very easy or very hard. you need to trace it, as laser engravers cant do thick solid lines very cleanly, so a traced design will look much better. you specifically need to use the poly-line or the curve-line tool, these might make it harder, but these lines will close and will form a shape. make sure each shape's fill color is set to be transparent, this will also make it easier to trace shapes inside that shape.

Onto the box, you need to shell a large rectangle, with the dimensions being 120mm by 35mm by 31.50mm, then duplicate this rectangle, and make it 1.5 millimeters smaller on all sides, this new hole rectangle will be 118.5mm, by 33.5mm, by 30mm. make sure that the hole rectangle is 1.5mm of the work plane. now highlight the two, and using the align tool, (the two squares in the top right corner) center them together, and group them.

Make a new rectangle with the dimensions of 99mm, by 7mm, by 30mm, and then duplicate it, making this new rectangle 97mm, by 4mm, by 30mm, this one needs to be another hole. duplicate it for later, then align these two and then group them, align the new rectangle and the older one and align them, but use the arrow keys to move the new one to one of the sides of the main shell you can then group these two together.

New rectangle time! this time the dimensions should be 13.50mm, by 20mm, by 6mm, and 7mm above the ground. then place it going through the box, on one to the side walls far from the slot so the switch wont collide with it, now a very thin cylinder 4mm by 4mm cylinder needs to go on the same half of the switch hole on the same wall closest to the acrylic slot.

this is a basic diagram of the circuit you will be making, you just need to connect the positive wire from the power supply to the switch, and the negative wire for the LED strip, and then an extra positive wire running from the switch to the positive on the LED strip

after soldering the red to the switch make sure that you then put the switch through the switch hole, and then just connect the other wires to their spots, it might be a bit of a tough fit depending on how you organize it but it shouldn't be too hard, then but the lid/bottom on and plug it in