Winning and losing with the led cube

It turns out that sometimes the only way to find out how to do something is to try and do it. That’s what I’ve been doing today. I’m building a cube out of LED panels. And today I ran out of reasons not to start assembling the parts. Above you can see one of the led panels that are going to be the faces of my cube. I’ve removed the original chassis from the back of the panel and fitted one that I printed yesterday. The new chassis is slimmer and has bevelled edges that let the sides fit closely together.

My printed panel fits exactly (more power to you Una the Ultimaker). I just had to remove the teeny tiny screws that secure the panel to the original chassis and then refit them into the the newly printed chassis. This is a fraught business. The screws engage with really tiny holes in the panel circuit board. If the screws miss their holes they tend to cut through tracks on the panel (that’s one panel broken). If you try to line up the panel with the chassis by pushing a pin through the hole in the pcb board this can catch on the leds on the front of the panel and remove them (that’s two panels broken)….

I managed to fix one broken panel by scraping the paint off and then re-making the connection with a blob of solder. The other panel has three LEDs on one edge which don’t light up red. Oh well. I ordered one extra panel in case of problems like this and I can still use my “broken” one in a picture frame as I just have to crop out that three pixel column from the side. On the whole, I’m going to call this progress…

If you want to see the work in progress I’ll be taking all my bits to the Hardware Meetup tomorrow. You can sign up here.