Blackout shades for imaging rigs

Your amazing imaging rig should be operated with the room lights on. There’s no reason you need to do your work in the dark. My rigs are built lightproof. Very lightproof. We could do experiments outside during the day if we wanted to. On the surface of the sun. During a sun storm.

To do so, you need a light-tight box for your rig. That’s relatively easy, except for access. How are you going to get at your rig? There are several options.

You could use a sheet. That’s about the worst solution I’ve seen. It leaks light like crazy. What’s the point of putting your rig in a light-tight box if you’re just going to undercut all of your efforts by throwing a plastic or fabric sheet in front? This is a million dollar rig! Don’t hang some dorm room tapestry reject over it!

Another option is some sort of door. Cool. That’s light tight and looks professional. They’re relatively easy to custom build too. McMaster or 80/20 or some similar company can offer options. The one annoyance is that it needs to have clearance to open.

The most elegant solution is to have blackout shades. These are great. They block light, and don’t require any clearance for opening. I use these for sidewalls on my light-tight boxes too– for easy access to the other sides of the rig. I discovered the solution shortly after I arrived in Michael Hausser’s lab at University College London. He had a room renovated for a couple of rigs, and the crew had installed blackout shades on the windows, complete with side channels. Most of these used big ball-chain mechanisms, so they’re annoying to open and close frequently. It takes a while, yanking on the ball-chains, to get them fully open or closed. However, the door to the room had a small window, and they added simple pull-up / pull-down shade to that one. It was easy and quick to manually open and close. Institute staff helped me connect with the contractors and they kindly made another one for me, to my measurements. It was a favor because they normally didn’t do small jobs like that. To this day, that’s the best quality one I’ve used. However, I can still get stuff that serves the purpose.

The one problem is that these blackout shades are hard to source. Custom building blackout shades isn’t as much of an option as it is for doors. For blackout shades, you need to custom order them. The good news is that they’re fairly cheap and lots of companies offer them. The bad news is that online shopping for blackout shades is a lawless hellscape. SEO, advertising, and cheap low-margin, low-quality products flooding the market have made online shopping generally awful. Add to that: poorly designed web sites for the companies that actually sell these things (can’t blame them– it’s a low-margin business), and we’re left in the lurch.

Here’s what you need to know:

You want blackout shades. Not blinds. Shades.

You want the side channels (and bottom channel if they offer one).

You want some material that is reasonably safe and easy to clean. Vinyl is nice, other things can be okay too.

You want it to be cord-free. You want to open and close it manually. Pull-up / pull-down. Some magnets to keep the bottom in place. You don’t want to have to yank repeatedly on a chain or cord to open the shades. Motorized would be an interesting option, but it would have to be fast. Open in < 3 seconds. Otherwise you’re going to go nuts.

You’ll need to measure the size you want and then order it. It’s hard to be 100% certain that you’re getting the right thing. You’ll have to just order something and see. Fortunately they’re so cheap (<$500 each, usually), that if you get the wrong thing, it’s not the end of the world.

Try shopping online… try calling places to get guidance if you’re having trouble finding what you need… call a company that does custom home theater installations in your area- they might know where to order blackout blinds from.

This might work, but I haven’t tried it– but if I ordered today this is what I would try: blinds dot com. Here’s a link, but I bet it won’t work for long. I selected black material, inside mount, cordless, standard roll, aluminum valance, with side channels / light blockers.