Using 3d printer filament as fiber optic accent lighting! Custom rope lights!

Now, before we get to the video, if you're new to the channel, I wanted to let you know that we try to stay up to date on all things 3D printing, from filament and printer reviews to in-depth slicer analysis, as well as a plethora of how-to videos. So if you haven't already, make sure you hit that subscribe button and ring the bell so you can be notified every time we post a new video. Hey guys, TechNibbers here. Before you freak out when the video is all dark, it's on purpose, just bear with me for a moment. The other day I was cleaning up my mess and I found this piece of remaining filament. Now, it's not very long, as you can see, and I've stuck something to the end of it. I'll explain that in a minute. This is 3D Solutec TPU, it is the clear version, and it's about a meter long, maybe a little bit longer. But I thought of something really interesting when I picked it up the other day, and I became curious. So I pulled out my cell phone and I turned on the flashlight, and that's when I realized this. It works excellent as fiber optic cable. So you do have some loss, distance isn't super great, but I can think of a million applications for this, say, inside a helmet or lining an outside of a helmet just with some cool glow lines or pretty much anything else. The LED I'm using here on my phone is quite a bit stronger than a standard LED, but there are ways to get lighting apparatuses that are this strong and this small, and this is amazingly bright. And this is what happens when you use a standard LED. Now, this is a pre-resisted LED for 12 volts running on a 9 volt battery. It could be a little bit brighter than this, but basically, I get about a foot and a half when it's straight, between 6 to 9 inches as I curl it, and you can see it's still got color all the way down here. I do have a green LED that we'll try as well here real quick, if I can get it plugged in. There we go. And the travel is actually a little bit better on the green than with the blue. You can see it going a further distance down the filament. This is pretty, pretty nifty. I can think of, as I said, several applications for this. If you think of any applications that I haven't thought of, please feel free to leave them in the comments down below. I'm going to turn my LEDs off, I'll turn the lights on for a sec and give you a quick look at this coupler setup I have here. So there you have it. Pretty nifty little trick. I think some really cool lighting effects can be achieved with this. I will say, after finding this, I tried a bunch of my other translucent and semi-translucent filaments to see if they would work, and this was the only one that had this amount of conductivity that you could actually see the light for any amount of length of it. I do have other clear filaments, but none of the other clears I have are TPU, so I'm not sure if that has anything to do with this or not. But real quick, I'll show you the barrel here. Now, this thing here is a, as I said, barrel. It's the part of a fiber optic cable that holds the cable itself in place, so when you insert the light, it shines into the flat part of the cable to get the most dispersion of light down the cable. Now, most fiber optic cables would actually have a couple of layers of wrapping around the outside to reflect the light back in. Since we're using this as more of a lighting effect, I didn't feel that was necessary, and it would have taken away from the whole purpose of the thing. So I do have a model going up on Thingiverse pretty soon, so keep an eye out for that. It is a printable version of something slightly smaller than this. This opening on this end of this coupler, which came off my stock Ender 3 hotend, basically is slightly too large to fit the LED in there, so I'm printing a different version that will not only clamp down on the filament without the bogie tube insert, but it will also insert an LED into this side and pretty much line them up perfectly so I don't have to hold it in place and it'll get the optimal position for pushing light down the tube. So, if you can think of any cool ideas to use this for, or any applications that I haven't thought of, please let me know. If you test out your filaments at home to see if any of the other ones are capable of doing this, and you find any that have properties as well as this one, or even possibly better, as I said, this is the first one I've found that's conductive of light like that. So, if you happen to come across one, or one that works extremely well, or you come across any unexpected results from putting your filament up to the light like that, please, please comment down below because I'm always curious to know these things. As always, this channel was brought to you by these fine Patreon supporters. If you'd like to support the channel on Patreon, head over to www.patreon.com slash technivorous. Alright guys, that's going to be the end of this video. As always, thank you. I'll put a video up right here that you can check out for more of our stuff. And, if you're still here and you haven't already, why don't you click right here and subscribe to the channel.