Tonight I settled in to get one of the Front Logic Displays (FLD) pieced together. I brought my laptop and plugged in a second monitor, fired up a Star Wars movie and stayed in touch with the world on Facebook...
One suggestion another builder made was to snip the LED prongs with a nail clipper instead of the ...ahem...Radio Shack clipper made for the role. The nail clipper makes a very clean cut while the other one does not, making it difficult to get the prongs to fit into the PCB board.
I found cutting them at an angle, right where the tab is, works best. It sure is a lot easier to get them to fit in the PCB with a pointed tip. I got more done in 45 minutes than last time, that was for sure.
Notice the LEDs all look a bit, well, unorganized. I'll work on making them more orderly when it is time to line them up with the bezel piece. For now, they are all in and ready for testing.
Next up was to get the Arduino UNO ready to go. With the Arduino software for Windows downloaded and installed, I just had to get the LED Library. All of these steps are detailed on this link
Following the instructions, I had power wires going from the FLD to the Arduino. If you have jumper leads, this is a lot easier! Servo wire is extremely thin and hard to keep secured into the power connector on the FLD.
With everything done, we had blinking lights!
So far so good....on to the next one!
Today I made a trip to my local electronics shop, ICC North in Brewer.
I picked up a MUCH better soldering iron that allows me to crank the output power from 25 watts on up to 65. Another thing ICC had was an LED tester. This little device made quick work of testing the LEDs and sort them out by color (they are all clear).
I had to correct a resister which I installed in reverse. Once I corrected that, it was on to referring to the layout of the front logic display, clip the correct LED and slide it into the board. Its an extremely tight fit and slow work...but I made some progress tonight.
Of course, I had company while doing this work...Pudgey decided to take up the chair next to be and took great interest in the LED legs being snipped off...
Here's where I left off tonight, I got 19 LEDs installed. Pictures show the front and back. No soldering until later, after we test power them and make sure they fit the template piece.
I decided to dive in and follow the instructions (http://www.barrettandcarly.com/blog/elec/tut/) provided to me. Here's a series of pictures detailing my progress tonight...
The lighting system used on my first R2-D2 is the JEDI lighting setup. The lighting is outstanding and I have wanted to get another set for this second droid.
However, there aren't any active runs going on. But, some of the builders have started on a project making their own setup that uses the Ardiuno microcontroller. One builder offers the circuit board, another makes the templates and you just have to find the LEDs and other parts to make it all work. I've never done anything like this before but the results I have seen are impressive. The other big thing is the price....the JEDI lights are beautiful, assembled but run around $300. For what you see in the picture below...under $100.
I have a fair amount of learning to do. Soldering, testing, programming the Arduino and who knows what next! Should be fun!
