I really wanted to use up some scrap COB LEDs I had laying around and thought it'd be cool to make a light box from the Fifth Element. I was surprised no one had made this yet!

THIS WILL BE A WIRING PROJECT INVOLVING SOLDERING

YOU WILL NEED BOTH MY PROJECT FILES / PRINT PROFILES SINCE THEY USE DIFFERENT GLOBAL VALUES

Parts used:

• 1x 7.8mm 5521 DC Jack
• 1x SPST Mini Switch
• Wire/solder/heatshrink
• COB LEDs in white, gold, blue, green, and red
• a stone-ish filament for the main body; I used up some old Overture Light Brown Matte PLA
• silver filament as a reflector, black filament as a light blocker; I used eSun Silver Metallic and Black PLA+
• a translucent filament; I used Sunlu Transparent PLA
• a 5V power source with at minimum 1A, more is better

I built this entirely in Fusion by looking at some stills from the movie. I learned I do not like fit splines 🤣

There are some little nooks inside the light box to run wires around. I started by soldering the 5521, then fed it's positive over to the switch and soldered it together with spare scrap wire as output. The ground from the 5521 and 5V from the switch then go to the first LED (I did Earth first). With COB LEDs you can just splice wiring in anywhere, so I'd carefully measure out my lengths, test fit them, then solder wires on one side, feed them through the hole to the next chamber and solder them on to the next strip. I kept my wires short, so I was soldering on top of the print as I went, took about half an hour. A little silicone mat to throw on top of the print while soldering kept it safe from heat.

I daisy-chained my way around - earth (green) → fire (red) → supreme being (white) → air (yellow) → water (blue). Make sure the ends of your strips do not connect back to their start and cause a short! The lengths of the strips I linked were perfect to leave only a tiny gap between ends if properly stuffed in to the corners.

The base print doesn't have much special going on. One of my supports fell off but it didn't matter in the end. There's a painted-on color swap to a silver filament to act as a reflector, I highly recommend keeping this if you can. Because I did not want light bleed between the elements, the center support is opaque. If you wanted to save time/material, you could do a layer change for this from 25-35mm height and make the whole thing transparent. That alone is an hour of swaps, but I'd recommend keeping it as the end result is beautiful.

The face print has a very fine first layer width and will take a while to print. It uses three materials - there are some “Blocker-Black” objects that comprise a single 0.2mm layer used to add opaqueness to the face of the print, since even at 1mm thick my test chips showed me the Matte PLA was still translucent. On top of that it'll print a series of 1mm thick transparent PLA pieces to hold things together and provide a diffuser for the lights. I had sampled using a more stone-colored filament (eSun Bone White PLA+) but found it muddled the colors too much for my liking. IF YOU WANT: you could shrink these to 0.4-0.6mm thick (just scale Z down and check placement) and print them in various colors so you could use only white LEDs to still get the proper effect. I had a the transparent PLA and colored lights though, and wanted the effect on the wall this provided.