Has anyone tried/considered using fiber optic wire as an alternative to wiring numerous LEDs?

Something like these with just a few high power IR LEDs at the ends, say, as an alternative to LED strips around an FTIR setup.

How about a bundle of thin strands at the end of an IR ‘brush’, or to make high contrast fudicials (that would even work on LLP setups).

Interesting idea!

I don’t see why it shouldn’t work. Although remember that fibre optic tubes are generally designed to keep light trapped inside so perhaps it’s not the best solution. I guess someone will have to try it and find out

fiberoptic cable is made in ‘endlight’ (the standard) and also ‘sidelight’ which looks a lot like neon tube when lit.
I experimented a little with the sidelight stuff and a red visible light laser just for fun...might be a technique available to explore there...might not. lol

Even with sidelight I doubt it would emit enough light to achieve true FTIR.  Could work though, I would be interested to see if someone tried it.

In my visible laser experiments, I found the emissions from sidelight cable were...well, weak. Lights up ‘real purdy’, but it disperses the light so much in the process that it loses alot of it’s oomph. I was using a 5mw laser for the tests, if you used vicious enough of a laser beam that was the full diameter of your sidelight fiber, it could be used as a lightsource for FTIR, it would definitely NOT be the most efficient use of the source illumination...but if someone simply HAD to try it, I think it could be persuaded to work.

In my experiments I also showed that the FTIR effect does occur with laser light as a direct source as well. Laser FTIR would need a rather complex beam shaping to be successful. Specifically, you would have to generate a beam that was a ‘thick plane’...it would need to be shaped to cover the whole edge, not merely a line drawn along it, and it would need to enter at 40 degrees from both above AND below the edge...so either two generators, or a beam splitter or some-such. The most primitive (and lossy) way I came up with to achieve a full surface flood with a single laser source used three line lenses and two mirrors.

I tested this successfully with a small visible light red laser and some glass rod as primitive line generators. To achieve the beam I needed, I used two glass rods at 90 degrees to each other. The first turned the dot into a line with a gaussian dispersion strength as we all know The second positioned carefully caught a section of that line the thickness of my acrylic edge and turned it into a fat line spreading the other way. When I fed that fat line into my acrylic at 40 degrees...I got equally spaced bands of hot and cold on my surface each the thickness of my edge...a second such from the bottom flooded all of the cold areas & viola I had complete even coverage and a fingertip touching the surface lit up quite brightly...BUT it made things glow red from a distance, so there was a fair amount of escape. 

The shaped band effect of this could be planned to generate a grid, checkerboard, etc of specific wavelengths across a surface should anyone have any idea why that could be useful, I’d love to hear some ideas.

I do not have the equipment to measure the escaping light and ensure an eye-exposure-safe level with IR, so I wasn’t going any further than the initial concept proof. Someone who has that equipment is encouraged to pick up this ball where I’m placing it, but it might be polite to give me a nod as it is in my papers with the rest of my experiments