Man it bugs me when magazines publish ideas that no one has any hope of building in the time given. Am archiving this one here so that we can build it in Nov 2015.
I think it needs more leds on the lower section, there’s no pcb cad files anyway so we’ll need to copy it. They used 0.2mm pcb, the thinest I can find cheaply is 0.6, might not be thin enough.
Why not just laser cut plastic and laser mark/cut lines where the wire is to
be glued with cyanocrylate?
The holes would be cut for the service mount LEDs and the plastic thickness
chosen to be the same as the LEDs.
The wires would be solder to the LEDS placed in the holes facing down.
Turn it over and all the wires and soldering is on the backside / bottom
side.
It would be much much cheaper and could be scaled up to a largish tree.
Bump. Now’s the time, if anyone wants to practice (or learn!) their PCB skills.
If you need inspiration, this project was originally done right before the popularisation of easy-to-use serial RGB LEDs.
So… I happen to have 1000 WS2812Bs coming, I’d be happy to donate some to the cause. There are a million libraries for the part of Altium, KiCad, Circuit Maker, Eagle, etc.
If you make the spiral arms thinner, then the PCB should still be flexible enough to bend when it’s 0.6mm instead of 0.2mm.
