Achieving a desired appearance

I recently saw this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sGmCox-toU showing a comparison of leaping arches. One standard arch, the other sheathed in white vinyl vent hose. I preferred the standard arch, however the idea got me to thinking about my poles. I wanted to have an RGB look without the expense of true RGB LEDs. The unfortunate thing is that no matter how closely you can physically place a red led, green led and blue led next to each other they will still look like red, green and blue points of light. From the opposite side of the street they might begin to appear to blend together but you'd have to be several houses away for them to totally blend together - and that's certainly not what I'm going for...

Tonight I experimented with a small section of white vinyl vent hose on my own. Like a dummy, I didn't take pictures until I achieved the look I was going for. So, to describe what I did: My first attempt was to wrap red, green and blue led strings around a broom handle (since I didn't have any PVC handy); stick that inside the vent hose; and light it up. It looked stupid. There were "hot spot" points of red, green and blue since the leds where pointing every which way and were uncontrollably close to or touching the inside of the hose. Next, I re-wrapped the broom handle, but this time kept the leds pointing in the same direction, securing them in place by wrapping the wires over the leds as I went. This helped eliminate the bright points of red, green and blue light; however the sheer randomness of the wrapping ended up creating clump patterns of color which still defeated the blending effect of the red, green and blue.

Finally, I used my new 1/4" clips and attached the leds to three plastic coat hangers and clipped the coat hangers together in a similar fashion to my original plan using 1/4" steel as a framework for my poles. Next I cut the vent hose lengthwise so I could wrap it around the lights since there's no way the hangers would fit inside the vent hose. This proved to be a blessing in disguise as well. I was able to affix the vent hose providing a maximum distance between the lights and the inside wall of the vent hose which is necessary to achieve good diffusion of light. Overall, I like the effect!

In addition to pictures, I have included a video below which demonstrates a test. It starts with all lights off, fades all lights on then off again; then fades up red and fade-cycles through the color spectrum.

Thank you William for letting me borrow a string of blue leds since my blues won't be arriving until LED Holiday Lighting ships the 2009 pre-order!