How To: Build a LED Panel for a Shuttle-Box

Posted On October 12, 2022

A shuttle-box system is a classic behavioral setup in which an animal can shuttle between two compartments that offer different environmental conditions. It is a useful tool to assess animals’ environmental preferences and or avoidance thresholds. Good lighting of the setup is a basic, but important component of the setup. If you’ve run out of glass tables, or operate within limited space, a LED panel might be a good solution.

Pretext – Why Should You Build a LED Panel

Skip directly to the instructions.

All modern shuttle-box systems employ video tracking of the animal. Usually, the animal is filmed from above and the shuttle-box is illuminated from below to create sufficient contrast between the animal and the background.

A simple approach to illuminate your shuttle-box is to use a glass table and place your light source with sufficient distance below the setup. This involves the least amount of work and is a great solution if you have enough space in your lab.

You can also buy an LED panel, as they are used to light up photo studios, etc. and mount your shuttle-box with a strong tempered glass plate and some aluminum construction above the panel.

Or you can build your own LED panel 🙂
Why should you do that? Here are some benefits:

• fit it to the available space
• use your preferred light sources
• adjust it to your needs (side-specific lighting, etc.)
• learn soldering

How to Build Your Own LED Panel

Components

• Frame: aluminum construction profile (here: 80 x 40 mm Bosch-type construction profile, link). I highly recommend using a layer of rubber to buffer between the frame and the cover glass (and to make this panel more water resistant)
• Baseplate: non-conducting plastic plate (PVC rigid foam plastic plate, 6 mm thick, should fit in the groove of the construction profile, link)
• Glue: double-sided tape
• LEDs: dimmable 12V LED strips (e.g., flexible SMD3528-300 strips with 4.8 W/meter, look it up at your favorite LED shop). If you want to use infrared for “night recordings”, make sure you get far infrared strips with 940 nm wavelength (like these). I ordered IP67 water proof stripes and I WOULD NOT recommend using these, as the silicone coating will make soldering these strips a living hell. To give you and idea of the amount of LEDs that you’ll need – I separated the stripes by ~3.5 cm which results in a homogeneous backlight
• Cable connectors: DYI or Wago connectors
• Power Supply: 12V supply with enough wattage (Mean Well HLG 150 H)
• Cover: tempered glass plate (frosted). I used a 12 mm thick glass plate which weighs around 10000 kilos, a little bit less will most surely also hold up your shuttle-box.
• Control: LED timer and controller (TC-420 LED controller, link)
• Cables
• Dimming: light absorbant foil

Assembly

• assemble the frame and make sure that the baseplate fits in it and the glass cover fits on it
• cut the LED strips to fit your shuttle-box (half the length, if you want to control lighting separately on both sides). Make sure that your strips are longer than your shuttle-box to avoid dark spots around the edges
• lay your strips on the baseplate (don’t glue them just yet) to get an idea of how long the wires need to be, and where you will connect the wires to the power rails (see picture on the top – the wires are connected to the power supply in the corners of the panel)
• solder speaker wire to strips. Don’t be frugal with the wire – err on the side of surplus. You don’t have to be an expert in soldering but start with a test strip (e.g., surplus) or, if you include different types of LED strips, start with the cheaper type 😉
• *extra step* if your test subjects are as light-sensitive as mine, you will want to reduce the brightness of the white LED stripes (otherwise you’ll only use them at 5% brightness which makes dimming really choppy). I glued a light-absorbant foil over the white LED strips
• now you can fix your strips to the baseplate (e.g. with double-sided tape). I alternated white and infrared LED strips with a distance of ~3.5 cm between strips of the same type.
• use cable connectors to connect all the + and – wires of the strips into one bus wire (e.g. one per side, strip type and polarity).
• connect the + and – bus wires of your strips to the LED controller according to your design. I connected white and infrared LEDs from both sides of the panel separately to my 5 channel controller (i.e., ch1 = white left, ch2 = infrared left, ch3 = white right, ch4 = infrared right)
• TEST RUN
• place glass plate and seal edges and corners, e.g. with tape to protect from water leakage

Construction Gallery

Room for Improvement

Here are some suggestions for improvement and practical tips:

• increase panel size and don’t fit the LED strips to the shuttle-box shape. This will increase the amount of material needed but it will make sure that there are no dark patches at the borders of the arena and reduce your work time
• use thin and flexible wires, they will be sufficient and will make cable management so much easier
• don’t use waterproof LED strips – the silicone coating is a nightmare to get off the soldering pads
• don’t use cheap tape (period.)