The Amazing Technicolor Makerbot

I decided the Wintermute needed some LEDs, but I didn't like the thought of doing static LEDs, so I'm working on adding LEDs all over. Some will be RGB and vary color based on various criteria, some will be single color and come on at certain times, and some will be single color and always on.

To get started, I needed a way to hold the LEDs. I wanted them to be small, so I wanted surface mount LEDs. So I designed and etched a board for the LEDs:

(I'll put this on Thingiverse once I feel like it's usable. Leave a comment if you're interested.)

You can see in the photo some of the magnet wire I used to wire them together. (BTW: I'm not affiliated with any of these links, so I'm just letting you know what I used. I'll let you know if there's an affiliation at any point.) This turned out to be more like sewing than soldering, but it was kinda fun too.

Soldering the single-color LEDs isn't too hard. They're small, so you have to have a steady hand. I solder them by putting a small blob of solder on one side, holding the LED in place, and then melting the blob with the soldering iron so that the LED sinks in and ends up flush to the board. I'm not sure where I learned this, but it was on the Internet. It was probably on Sparkfun. Here's a Youtube video made by Sparkfun:

Here you can see some the right column is soldered in place, and the solder blobs on the left half of the other items:

One note about design: I designed the RGB LEDs with the resistors in place, but for the individual LEDs I didn't put resistors on the board. This was partially a mistake (forgetting to make room for some resistors) and partially experience. The RGB LEDs are very sensitive. (I blew out two of them and had to remove them and put new ones in their place.) The single LEDs I'm using are fairly robust (it took 12v to blow them out ;-), and so I'm using a single (PTH) resistor for a string of three, with the three in parallel. Like this:

Once I have a row or column soldered up, I use scissors to cut them off of the board and solder them together using the magnet wire. Here's the RGB LEDs and resistors soldered up, with the right column of single-color LEDs cut off:

And then cut out:

I'm still working on the control circuitry, which will control the colors based on one of several criteria. I'm thinking right now the most useful will be temperature of the nozzle and heated build platform.

Here is my current state of progress:

I have blue LEDs in the "floor" and white LEDs below the Z-platform to illuminate the build platform from above. The build platform is a MBI Heated Build Platform and has a ring of red LEDs under it to show when it's heating. (That's not shown in this photo.) The Z-platform has RGB LEDs at the back and on the side of the extruder. In the photo, all of the red, green, and blue are at full voltage, so they're making "white". (The red in these RGBs is a little weaker than the green and blue.)

That's all I have time to blog for now, but I'll show how I connected them to the 'bot, as well as my progress on the control circuitry in later posts. (You can peruse my Flickr and see what I'm up to. It gets updated first.)