More Squares!

PCB minus 3 signals

To the left is the picture of the PCB in it's current state. I used FreeRouter, a plugin in KiCad that will route a PCB for you. I basically wanted this done so that I can move on to other things, so I allowed that to work it's magic. There is, however, 3 signals that still need to be routed. For some odd reason, pin 6 on all of the CD4051's are not coming through from the schematic to the PCB design, so I am still in the process of figuring out exactly what is going on with that. I have some pretty clear routes and there is still some clean up to be done to the board, but it is 95% done.

16 X 8 panel.

There has also been some progress made with the assembly of a panel. As you can see in the photo on the left, we have built a 16x8 panel. We intended to use this as a 16x7 text scroller for a competition at the school, but that never got fully completed. It did give me some insight into how much of a pain it is going to be to connect together all of the powers and grounds on a panel.






To help with progress on assembling the panel, we use the following 2 guides: a bending guide and a soldering guide.

Bending Guide.

 
The bending guide on the left shows the 3 stages of LED bending. The first stage, on the left, is ensuring that the LED is aligned properly. Also, one ensures that the anode of the LEDs is aligned with the bend above the LED, and all the cathodes are aligned to aim for the slots below the LED. Stage 2 (middle) shows the leads being bent in the correct orientation. The right shows the final result.

Soldering Guide

From there, 4 LEDs go into a line along the soldering guide on the right. We have found the best way to make a 4x4 grid out of one of these guides is to create 4 lines of 4 LEDs each. From there, create 2 4x2 grids of LEDs, and then solder that together.

Our goal with these guides is to create consistent 4x4 grids that we can easily and relatively quickly assemble into a 24x24 grid. We have found that in order co complete that objective this term, we need to complete 36 of these. We have 22 4x4 grids left to do.