Vacuum Tube LEDs: Mogul Bulb Side Light

The knockoff Neopixel on the 500 W mogul-base bulb failed in the usual way, so I rebuilt it with an SK6812 RGBW LED in a round cap:

Mogul lamp socket - SK6812 LED side cap
Mogul lamp socket – SK6812 LED side cap

The nice 1-¼ inch stainless socket-head cap screws replace the 1 inch pan-head screws that engaged maybe one thread due to the additional spacer between the USB port and the upper hard drive platter I added for good looks.

I tried a few iterations of an aluminized Mylar (*) disk with various sized pinholes over the RGB trio to crisp up the filament shadow, because the SK6812 LED casts a more diffuse light than the W2812 LEDs:

Aluminized Mylar pinholes for SK6812 RGBW LED
Aluminized Mylar pinholes for SK6812 RGBW LED

Even the ⅛ inch pinhole made the bulb too dim, so I settled for a fuzzy shadow:

500 W Mogul bulb - SK6812 RGBW LED - no pinhole - green phase
500 W Mogul bulb – SK6812 RGBW LED – no pinhole – green phase

The firmware has a tweak forcing the white LED to PWM=0, because this bulb looks better in saturated colors.

(*) Here on earth, aluminized Mylar is nonconductive.

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