Spent the last three weekends on this project and it's finally on the wall. Cut four layers of 3mm ply on a friend's laser, stacked them with spacers so there's a gap between each ring, and tucked a strip of addressable LEDs behind the back layer pointing inward. The light bounces off the wall and bleeds through all the cutouts, so the whole thing kind of glows instead of just lighting up. WLED did all the heavy lifting on the software side. I'm running the palette cycle effect at a slow speed with a warm white blend added in, and at night we drop the brightness way down and switch to a soft fade. The wife was skeptical about another glowing thing in the living room but she's the one who keeps changing the presets now. One tip if anyone tries something similar: don't glue the layers togehter before testing your diffuser setup. My first attempt had hotspots where the LEDs sat too close to the wood, and I fixed it just by adding a strip of plain white foam tape along the back of the middle layer to bounce the light around a bit. Only thing left is tidying up the power cord hanging down from the bottom, thinking about routing it through the wall or just painting it to match. Still figuring that part out, but honestly I might leave it as is and call it done.
Finally hung my laser-cut mandala wall lamp and the WLED effects look unreal
Nov 10, 2026
Last reply: 3 hours ago
5 Replies
I did something along the same lines a couple years back with a backlit moon phase panel, and the spacing issue you ran into is exactly what bit me too. I had my strip about 5mm off the back panel and got these bright streaks wherever the LEDs sat. What ended up working for me was moving the whole strip further back, maybe 25 to 30mm out from the wood, and putting a layer of white craft foam behind it. Once the light had room to spread before hitting anything, the hotspots basially vanished.
Your foam tape fix makes sense for a shallower build like yours. I've also seen people get decent results lining the inner walls of the gap with aluminum tape and leaving the facing surface matte, which pushes more light forward instead of losing it in the cavity.
On the software side, I landed on a similar setup. Most of the time mine runs a slow two color gradient, but I made a dedicated preset with just a handful of warm white LEDs lit at low brightness for late evenings, since the full color cycles felt too busy when we were watching TV. WLED's preset buttons made it easy enough that my kids fight over who gets to change it, so I know how the wife thing goes. For the cord, I painted mine with cheap craft paint mixed to match the wall and it disappeared pretty well. Took two coats but beat cutting into drywall.
For the cord, I'd lean toward painting it before going through the wall. I painted mine with leftover wall paint on a scrap piece first to test the coverage, and after two thin coats it basically disappears against anything light colored. Routing through drywall means patching and fishing later if you ever move it, and I regretted doing that in my old place the moment I rearranged the room. On the lighting side, I built somthing similar last winter but took the opposite approach with the placement. Instead of bouncing light off the wall, I ran shorter strips along the inner edge of each ring and set them up as seprate segments in WLED. That way each layer can shift at its own pace, so the outer ring stays a slow warm amber while the inner ones cycle through cooler colors. It reads more like separate glowing rings than one big glow, which suits the mandala shape nicely.
One thing that surprised me was how much the preset schedule matters. I set mine to auto-dim after a certain hour and my partner stopped complaining entirely, whereas before it was always too bright during movie nights.
The power budget for running four full layers of addressable LEDs on a single voltage rail is a concern I always bring up with these kinds of stacked projects. If the total draw exceeds the capability of your chosen power supply, you are likely going to introduce voltage fluctuations that can lead to color shifting or premature component failure in the later sections. Have you calculated the maximum amperage draw for all the strips combined, and are you using a dedicated 5V switching power supply capable of handling that load? I found that stabilizing the power delivery significantly improved the consistency of the color transitions in my larger builds.
I agree with the idea of painting the cord to hide it. Using cheap paint is definitely the way to go since you can just test it on a scrap first. I had some trouble getting a totally smooth finish on the actual power supply block when I painted it myself, so I ended up using a small foam roller to get a smoother, more even layer of paint. It made a huge difference in how profesional the final setup looked.
The whole voltage drop thing people keep bringing up with stacked LEDs feels a little overblown. I've run projects with four layers of similar fixtures and the draw wasn't anything special, so maybe the calculation is unnecessarily strict. If you are power starving the strip, then maybe it is the wiring or the specific driver, not the design itself. I wonder if using two separate power injection points distributed across the layers would mitigate those concerns better than one long rail. It might be a hassle, but it seems like a more practical solution than overthinking the math on paper.
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