This is a quick project I made to explore dichroic filters. I just love the colours that can be produced, and wanted a way to display it easily.

In the last few years, these dichroic cubes have appeared on eBay. They’re used inside projectors to combine red, green & blue colour channels into a full image. And, apparently making them isn’t a perfect process, so a bunch of defective ones regularly end up for sale.

I used a couple of stepper motors to allow the cubes to be rotated at a slow yet precise speed, and used the same unwise technique from before to simplify wiring. I then used some high power LEDS to provide illumination:

Side note: The ‘unwise technique’ still seems to be paying off surprisingly well. Everything you see in the video is running straight off the arduino, via USB with no other power supply.

To collimate the light from the LED I used some lenses from eBay jeweller’s loupes (which were so terrible that their main value is for parts), and made a lasercut holder for the lens. The light assemblies are mounted on thin brass shims to allow bending and positioning them by hand:

Files up here for anyone that wants to make their own:

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3591151