Introduction: Easy Giant LED Backlit Moon

About: dad hacker tinkerer maker

I wanted a giant moon. High resolution and back lit, and I didn’t want it to take up a bunch of room, so it had to be pretty flat. I’ve got really high ceilings in my living room, so I knew I could go huge without it feeling weird and claustrophobic.

Step 1: Find Your Curtain

Here are the 2 shower curtains I found. They were roughly $30 each. The resolution isn’t as high as I’d like, but from a few feet away, you’d never know. The larger moon on the left is somewhat elongated and overlaps with the grommets at the top. Despite that, I decided to use the larger just for the impressive size. The smaller one may get finished and placed into a classroom in the near future.
I also purchased some cheap frosted vinyl shower curtains to act as diffusers.

Step 2:

here you can see the frosted vinyl shower curtain I added as diffuser

Step 3:

For the frame of this whole thing, I wanted to use something that you could construct with little or no tools. I remembered that people make hula hoops out of pex tubing all the time, so I went that route. You can saw through this stuff pretty easily. I used a pull-saw for wood but you could probably get through it with a steak knife if you were persistent enough.

Step 4:

Another great thing about pex is that it is soft enough to staple into. I simply stretched the shower curtains over the frame and stapled it in place. Well, if you watch the video I first explored a different route that turned out to be a complete waste of time and ugly as well, but there’s no need to rehash that here. Just staple it.
After you’ve stapled it in place, cut off the excess shower curtain to clean it up.

Step 5:

I used an RGB LED strip. I probably wouldn’t use this strip if I did it again. I chose it because it was cheap, but the white is super blue. I probably would look for a more true white strip and skip RGB all together.

Applying the LED strip was easy enough. It has an adhesive backing, and sticks well to the pex tubing.

Step 6:

They sell these clips for pex that you can simply press the pipe into and it grips it pretty well.

I actually cut some of the tip off of the clip to make the grip a bit less extreme. Once I had a ring of these screwed into my wall, all that was left was to press the moon into place!