Making a Laser Cut LED Soldering Jig @adafruit #adafruit @johnedgarpark
I’m soldering a bunch of LED matrices for an upcoming project, using the excellent Trellis driver boards and UV LEDs which I’ll be controlling with Trinket Pro boards. To keep all 80 LEDs straight while soldering, I decided it would be worth the effort to make a jig to hold the LEDs in place, rather than use the usual method of bending LED legs. (Sometimes the bent leg method leads to slightly tilted components, and for my final application I want the LEDs to be very uniformly oriented.)
I drafted the jig in Rhino, and then cut it on the laser cutter from 1/4″ acrylic. Here’s a video loop of the cutter in action, making me slightly nervous with those flare-ups as the beam hit the vector grid, but it turned out just fine. (If you look closely you’ll see the ghost of my Chewbacca mask watching over me in the reflection of the lid.)
Here are a set of LEDs awaiting their solder-y fate.
Building jigs isn’t always worth the effort, but in this case I think the investment was worthwhile.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell with Google Hangouts On-Air is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
