Situation
Here at Birds, we’re still (mostly) practicing Shelter-in-Place. We have a weekly video meeting, but because my camera faces a window, I’ve been overexposed. On brighter days, the sun completely blows out the image of my face, essentially making me look like an anonymous person in a documentary. I have a lamp in front of me, but it’s not nearly bright enough to combat the sun. And then I realized: I have a strip of LED lights that I used to light my 3D printer. It might be able to create a cheap ring-light that might work quite nicely. I thought about buying a USB ring light, but with all that LED strip sitting around, why not make it myself?
Parts
The LED strip requires 12 Volts, roughly 8, AA batteries (USB can provide 5 Volts). I bought a USB Buck Converter, which is adjustable and lets me convert that 5 Volts to 12 Volts (it provides less Amperage, but in this instance that isn’t a problem for the short run of lights). I also bought a cheap 12 Volts LED strip controller with a remote. This takes the 12 Volts and runs it through a controller that will decide how much (if any) goes to the red, green, blue, and white LEDs.
Construction
I aimed for this to be a temporary fix, and thus didn’t want to solder anything. All parts screw-in or clamp-down. I cut a length of strip that had 3 LEDs in it and wired it up to the controller, which worked! I used a binder clip to attach it to the bezel of my laptop screen and gave it a test. Because of the quality of my laptop camera, the results weren’t spectacular, but they were enough to go from being unable to see my face on a sunny day to at least being visible. Also, this means I can reuse the controller on the rest of my strip with an actual 12 Volt power supply and light up a ton more to add accents to my apartment.