Spindle Light

Description

Standard version:

The spindle light was designed to work with a 500W spindle and any CNC machine you want! Thanks to the holes in the PCB you can attach it to your spindle with M4 screws. Diameter of the hole inside the PCB is 30.5mm and thanks to that you should be able to use it with 1.5kW spindle too but mounting is not going to be that easy because there are no holes from the bottom (before buying measure the diameter of the bottom part of your spindle and make sure that it will fit).

I made 2 prototypes of this project. The first one was made on a Dremel CNC and with different low-power LEDs. I made a mistake on the second prototype and GND wasn’t distributed to all the LEDs 🙁

The third one is the final product with some modifications based on the two first prototypes.

Sold without any cables, you have to solder those on your own to the SMD pads. It’s also a really good idea to protect it from any shorts from aluminum chips or just wood dust. It should be powered with 12V and consumes about 0.38A (if you want to control the brightness you can use a variable buck converter and set it to 11.5V or lower). Those are high-power LEDs so the PCB may get a bit hot, that’s normal.

With epoxy:

Here you can learn more about the version protected with epoxy:

Having a PCB with LEDs really close to the spindle while machining wood or aluminum might damage or short something. I wanted this thing to last longer so I made custom molds out of silicone and started casting epoxy on top of the PCB.  The result looks great (remember that there might be some air bubbles in the epoxy and usually there is some epoxy on the bottom of the PCB) is waterproof and should last a long time! It’s exactly the same PCB with the same LEDs as the standard version just the protective layer of epoxy is added.  In the video above you can see the process of prototyping and finally making this product. I am producing those on my own in my workshop 🙂 10 cm long cables are soldered to the PCB in this version.