Theatre Lighting at Home

In March 2020 I (like most college students) was sent home from college to attempt to learn online.

One of the more interesting labs I completed at home was a theatre lighting project for thetre technology class I was taking at the time. If classes were still in person, this would have been completed with real stage lighting equipment in the University’s performing arts center. I decided to create a scale model of a stage using LEGO figures, cardboard, and small LED’s. This also made the project more applicable to my Electrical Engineering major (I was also very bored at the time).

I had originally considered using an Arduino to control the lamps because of the ability to control brightness that would be gained from this but eventually had to simplify my solution because I needed to use both of my Arduinos for a different project at the same time. I did still use LEDs though, I used 8 white LEDs and 10 Red LEDs to light the stage, all of these shared the same ground wire and had a power supply controlled by a switch on the “Breadboard Companion” I built in High School. The power supply for that came from a 9V wall adapter. I also soldered a 220 Ohm current limiting resistor to each LED to keep brightness uniform and to keep the LEDs from drawing too much current and burning out.

The picture above shows the individual LEDs after I soldered the current limiting resistors.

The finished stage had 3 different lighting modes: Red, White, or Red and White. These were to represent the different moods during a stage production.

Stage Lighting Modes.