With Glow Flow sitting stable on three stubby feet, I am out of excuses and must confront an important but very challenging topic that I've been putting off: light diffusion.

LEDs are very bright point sources by nature, which is very useful for some applications. But most lighting applications would prefer to diffuse light across a larger surface. Unfortunately there is no single best way to do so, one method which is ideal in one application won't necessarily be ideal on another. Getting perfect LED diffusion on a cost constrained, mass produced, real world product, is an art form sitting at the intersection of engineering, design, and black magic.

Fortunately, as an one-off hobby project, I don't need to perfectly balance appearance with manufacturing cost and complexity. I just need "looks pretty good" and that's an easier bar to meet. I'll obtain a few experimental data points to guide my design, starting with some cheap and easy diffusers. And there's nothing easier and cheaper than going in the kitchen to grab some white paper towels for installation with masking tape.

Pixelblaze glow flow paper towel diffuser tape closeup

Paper towels give better diffusion than standard copy paper due to their fibrous construction lending to greater thickness. This helps with their primary purpose of absorbing liquids, but in this off-label application it also helps with absorbing and redistributing light energy.

Wrapping a layer of paper towels around this LED helix had a surprisingly large benefit to making Glow Flow better looking. This was the first data point: I probably won't need anything terribly fancy to achieve good enough diffusion. The second point came from pieces of paper towel that weren't sitting flat against the surface: when they bulge away, the diffusion improves, so a little distance helps.

Pixelblaze Glow Flow with paper towel diffuser closeup

This was the state of the project when I brought it to show off at Hackaday Los Angeles July 2019 meetup. People seemed to like it, and I'm only just getting started on the exterior design.

https://twitter.com/Regorlas/status/1149778693864054784