The Tron Light

I had a problem. I usually work at my PC under low light, to keep the glare from the windows off the screen. And since I have a wireless keyboard which sits on my lap, the shadow from the desk makes it impossible to see the keys. Aside from that they keyboard itself is black, so that doesn't help much.

It makes it annoying to find the PageUp/PageDn keys and tell them apart from Insert and Delete since they're all bunched together. I figured I needed a keyboard light. So I came up with this one. I found some high intensity blue LEDs which seem to tolerate 6V real well, chained them together and put them in a piece of plastic network conduit I had left over. And the Tron lamp was born.

It runs off 4AA batteries, although I've managed to run it just as well off 2 button cells. I like the AA because, according to my calculations, I should get about 15 hours of light before needing to recharge. I doubt I could get that much out of the button cells.

The light is ok. It's not something you'd want to operate someone under, but it's good enough to let you find those lost keys in the dark. I also tried red light, unsuccessfully (LEDs were too dim). White LEDs could be nicer, but they were out of those at the store and you wouldn't get that cool blue glow.

Total cost for the whole thing was about $2. Mainly the LEDs and a couple battery holders. Plastic channel and batteries were free, since I had those around the house.