I'm not sure if this is the best place to ask, but I felt it is closest to the subject matter... Ermmm... Sort of.

For those who don't know, I am doing Product Design Technology. I was going to go down the line of producing a product for photographers, but the feasability was an issue so I am making a new style mirror/mood lighting sort of thing (yeah, what did I say about this best fitting this forum? lol)


Anyway, I'd just like some advice on the best way of powering the mood lighting bit of the product.

The mirror is estimated to be 1434mm in perimeter. I'd like to have LEDs (or is there a better lighting source?) surrounding the entire frame. But to make it even worse, I'd like there to be several colours of LED. Say, blue, white and red? The superbright kind which will actually light stuff up!

Now I've done some calculations and it would seem those LEDs would cost £120 for just 2 colours. These are LEDs sold on wire strips you can cut to length and all that jazz. Is that a reasonable estimate of price or am I getting the numbers wrong? It seems like a lot for LEDs which are often classed as really cheap.

Is there a better lighting source than LEDs for this sort of thing? The power supply is not yet decided. Battery power would probably die out quite quickly, so a 12V mains supply maybe?

What sort of circuit components would I have to look at to make one lot of LEDs fade out after a certain time and the next ones activate? I don't think the strip LEDs allow for this, so is it down to buying one helluva load of LEDs and wiring them myself?


Edit: It would probably look better if the lighting was just down the sides, so that is 620mm on each side of the mirror for lights.


Cheers.

Some products seem to give you 36 LEDs per 400mm or about that.

Prices would be GBP, but yeah I expected them to be in the pennies, not in the pounds, for LEDs of the type I require.


What other lighting alternative is there? Besides from LEDs entirely. A wild guess but might something such as fluorescent tubes provide the answer? I'm no expert whatsoever, but are there similar lighting methods where a certain voltage will produce a certain colour? With fluorescents it is down to the gas isn't it? But something similar in tubes at the length I require. Does anything like that exist?

That's actually a pretty good idea actually. If I could find the right colour style ones, then that would work really well. Usually Christmas tree lights are bright enough and should give a large enough radius of light on the wall behind it.


Thanks for that