Powering the Magic
When designing the perfect magical staff, lighting up was a must have. Almost all the wizard staffs in our favorite games and movies lit up. And the ones that didn't….well let's just say that our woodworking skills aren't good enough to compensate for the lack of magical lights.
So where does an Artificer start? With the power source. We used that to drive all our decisions. We decided on a phone charger, as they have an abundance of power for our purpose (5000mAh)! They are also extremely safe, as they are well insulated, and have a very low voltage (5v) and amperage (2.4A). The icing on the wizard cake is that they have standard USB connection for easy wiring, and are even rechargeable.
So now we have the power, what's next? Lights! We just needed to find a low wattage bulb that was 5v, 2.4A max, and radiated light in 360 degrees to light up our crystals. How hard could that be?
(Many months and orders from Amazon and AliExpress later)
Apparently pretty hard. We have high standards, and nothing was just right; some lights only illuminated the base of the crystal, some only illuminated in 180 degrees, most were bad at light diffusion, and produced much too obvious “pins” of light in the crystal. So what's a wizard to do?
LED strips to the rescue! They are good at diffusing light, can be customized to length, are flexible to shape, are extremely bright, and are very low wattage. They are even rated to last an average of 50,000 hours. We combined these with our own custom LED diffusers to produce the perfect wizard light bulb. Each bulb contains 48 individual LEDs. Whew…what a journey.
The final result is a magic staff that can shine brightly for a wonderful 50 hours of continuous use, and can be easily recharged.
