Booooo-ring

76 done, 164 to go... woooo... I can hardly contain myself.


On more of a constructive/productive note, this weekend, I sat down and figured out just how many of each length I would need. I drilled a couple holes in the board and zip-tied a driver board to two of the areas to be mounted. With 6 driver boards per "module", and with the layout as it is, there are 2 different shapes of sections, with 8 of one type and 4 of the other.


In the image above, which shows a single module (2 of them, remember), the 8 sections that are alike are the two different shades of red and the two different shades of blue. Doubling this makes for the total needed for both modules. The other shape is the two green regions, doubling again gives 4.

So anyway, back to the length requirements, there are two lengths to the LED triplets that I have been making. The first is the twisted-pair wire going from the resistors to the LEDs. These are all 7" long and will be entirely inside the pixel. The remaining length is from the resistors to the driver board header. I am using 4-conductor wire for this and the measurements required are as follows: (cut length, before stripping or soldering)

• 28 pieces @ 12"
• 68 pieces @ 8"
• 84 (!) pieces @ 6"
• 24 pieces @ 5"
• 20 pieces @ 4"
• 16 pieces @ 2"

For those of you following at home, this comes to 1616", or just under 135'. Add in 720 (3 needed per triplet!) 7" twisted-pair wires, totalling 5040" (420'), that makes ~555' of wire needed. This is about 2.3' per pixel. Far less than some *ahem* other people's projects.

What I currently have soldered:

• 30 pieces @ 12" (2 more than I need, I think I'll make due... probably make 2 fewer 8" pieces)
• 17 @ 8"
• 29 @ 6"

Yay slow progress...

Slow progress

Sorry for no updates in a while. I was out of town for work for a week and had a few other things going on the following week.

I've got the next batch of 17 LED triplets done, so now I'm up to 64 of 240 done (past the 1/4 mark!).
I bought another 300 feet of 2-conductor wire and another 70 feet of heatshrink tubing (all for a whopping $30! Gotta love Axe-Man). This should keep me going for a little while anyway. I will need to order some more LEDs soon, as well as some more 2x2-pin headers that connect to the driver boards.

Whee!