LED dial light pipes, second try

I did some more testing yesterday. I moved the connection points for the slits to the inside of the circle, tried engraving to make room for the leds, tried engraving slits to make them not go all the way through and made a black circle for the center.

Unfortunately I fucked up bigtime when cutting so everything is covered in oily brown residue. But I can still test the concepts.

Initial conclusion: Engraving room for the leds does not work at all. The diffuser has to be some distance from the LED, having it on top of it made the result very blurry. It may be a combination of this and light leakage between the cells, but it seems we get the best result when we have completely separate (cut) cells 'projecting' onto a diffuser.

The previous version with connection points on the outside and a simple diffuser still works the best. It may be that 3mm light pipes (i.e. 3mm plexi) is better to focus the beams.

There is also a lot of light leakage between the cells in the unengraved 2mm version. Not sure if this is because of the short light pipes or the moval of connections from outside to inside. Mostly the edges of the slits light up for at least the two neighbouring cells.

As for trying to make the cells bleed a little to get a continous bar, I feel that that did not work very well at all, the edges get blurry very quickly so I probably have to accept that they are slightly separated.

Using clear 3mm pipes with a 0.3mm spacing to the diffuser gives a continous bar but with slight bleeding. May be acceptable if we want a bar. No spacing will give an extremely sharp edge which is also very cool.

Further testing
- Is engraved room for led combined with cut cells working?
  a: somewhat but not very well

- Are engraved slits working or significantly worse?
  a: not conclusive but may achieve the same with a spacer

- what works best, connection points inside or outside the circle
  a: outside seem slightly better.

- will dividers between the cells improve bleeding
  a: Definitively, but needs to be dark color

- should we cut dividers even closer to minimise contact points?
- Is 2mm (or close to 1mm really) worse than 3mm for light pipes

- diffuser - should it be a continous ring or start and stop at the ends of the led ring?
- diffuser - try individual cells? Does it look cluttered?

I think that the diffuser may be less visible if it is a full circle and not divided into cells, especially once it is red.