My current desk has enough space, but not enough light. As it is built upon a straight frame with storage at the end, I thought to put in a large light panel.

Turns out large low power light panels are too expensive for me, so I decided to use LED strips running around the inside of the open frame, covered by a diffuse material, mabye perspex, or just cloth.

After looking at various LED strips available, and taking into account I will probably be running it from an Arduino (or similar), I came across the WS2812B.

The WS2812B is an addressable RGB LED integrated chip. It comes on a strip with 3 lines. 5v power is on the outer 2 lines, and the middle the line is for data. Thats just 3 pins on each end. The nice part is that power can be fed from either end of the strip, whereas data can only go into one end and out of the other. We can also use the same power transformer as the Arduino (or similar) .

The WS2812B will also do nicely to light a set of bookshelves.