The Beginners Guide To Fiber Optics

  Fiber optics themselves are clear and colorless, so a fiber optic lighting system installed in a project will take on whatever color light you shine through it, or undulate with color patterns if your light source is programmable or dynamic.

  Fiber optics come in a variety of diameters, shapes and types. In fact, the options seem to be growing every time I look online. Different variations are better for different applications, so I'll talk here about all the different types I've encountered and the best uses I've found for them. I'll also be adding to this Instructable as I discover more fiber optic knowledge, but for now, this is what I know.

Step 1: What Are Fiber Optics

The fiber optics I'm dealing with in this Instructable are the plastic fibers designed for lighting, not the slightly more sophisticated glass fiber bundles that transmit data rapidly over long distances, but they function on the same basic principle: Light shining in one end from a source of illumination, like an LED or a laser, travels down the fiber optic strand and emerges at the other end.

A standard "end emitting" fiber optic designed for lighting is a long thin strand of plastic consisting of a very clear core and an external coating called a cladding. 

  End emitting fibers (also called end glow, or end light) are the classic fiber optics, with bright points of light at the ends and very little light escaping along the strands themselves. They are usually thin, somewhere from .25 to 3mm in diameter. They are also generally stiffer than the side emitting fibers.

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