Still waiting on the big thaw, so the boat's still in storage but I found I could start my modest LED project at home by beginning with cup holders.
My existing cupholders are white plastic, so it wasn't a big deal to grab some extras to experiment with LED lighting.
I want my cupholders illuminated in red in the hopes that this will help protect night vision. Ordered up both 5mm and Superbright LEDs from http://www.oznium.com.
I found that the 5mm LEDs would install right into the existing cup holder's drain hole.
I knew that this type of mount would work well for lighting up bottles,
but didn't expect that it would spread enough to illuminate the cupholder as well.
In fact, only two things pevented me from going this relatively inexpensive route.
1) Blockage of existing drain hole.
2) The waterproof 5mm LEDs are too focused, like a flashlight the LED projected this 2' diameter light on the ceiling 4' above my workbench.
Not wanting to randomly highlight the areas above the cupholders, my experiments continued.
Here's the waterproof superbright LED in a side mount.
I originally thought I'd have one of these to light up the cupholder, and the 5mm LED to light up the bottle, but amazingly this config does both well. Too well for my camera unfortunately, the pics look far lighter in the image - to the naked eye they look even more red than the 5mm pics above.
That's water in the Corona bottle, BTW.
Anyway, the superbrights do spread the light much better so that only a light glow appears on the workshop ceiling. This is the route I'm going, hope it helps others.
I will be illuminating a few other areas, I'll resurrect this thread after the big thaw.
