Posts Tagged ‘DIY PCB’

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Toner-transfer prototype PCBs

2009/08/12

There was a post today on Hackaday about using a dowel to help transfer toner as part of an etching process.  It reminded me about something my fiancee found, actually…  She was googling my name for pictures, and ran across images of a PCB I did during the development process of a product that’s now into its 3rd production run (granted, only 25 units per run, but it is part of a $10,000 tool…).  It just so happens though that these images are on PulsarFX’s website, used as the showcase project for the toner transfer paper and method they sell.  Pretty slick, eh?

So I was thinking, I should probably try to thoroughly document how I actually pulled off such a PCB.  I’ll start sketching out how I’m going to organize it, and hopefully get started writing it up sometime soon.  It may be text-only for now, as I’m not really in a position to do a whole picture sequence at the moment.  Getting married in 3 weeks is not the time to start trying to re-assemble my PCB pipeline…

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First-generation LED project

2009/08/01

I first built LED lighting hardware around 3 years ago, after first reading about the BAM technique from Artistic License.  I ended up building a kit from scratch consisting of a controller and 8 fixtures.  The controller has 2 boards with ATmega8515′s each driving 16x 2N2222′s grouped in 4′s, with RJ-45 connectors.  The fixtures are 4x4x2″ enclosures with PCBs holding a total of 96 LEDs each, 24 each of red, green, blue, and white, again with RJ-45′s.  The first round of 4 fixtures were strictly resistive-ballast, while the second round used LM317′s in constant-current mode.  This coupled with a slightly higher drive voltage allows the fixtures to be strung on anywhere from 3ft to 100ft of standard Ethernet cable.

Last Christmas I decided to go a little overboard on the first tree of my own…  4 of the fixtures are embedded in the tree, while 4 more are behind the curtains as uplights.  Control is via DMX-512 driven by an ENTTEC Open-DMX USB bridge, with a cable running to my computer running custom color-changing code written in Python.

2008 Christmas tree

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