Jig: Mk. 2

Sunday afternoon, a perfect moment to spend some time in the man cave :)

I decided to build another jig, since the first one is, well... crap. The main reason for that are my lack of skills. Fortunately there are plenty of tools to compensate for it, and my old man has a shed full of 'em :)

Starting with a nice jig to compensate for my horrible skills with a saw (it even says "no skills required" on the box, perfect!)

 Finally, 90 degree angles! I decided to make the columns in the jig 10mm deep, that will leave 15mm of space left for putting the LEDs in. I want the columns to be about 14mm wide, so there will be around 11mm of space between the LED pillars when they're installed. Unfortunately the wood is 22mm thick. Sawing that off would be a pain in the behind, so enter tool nr 2:

Yes, it's an electric planer. At the highest setting it turns 2mm of wood into a large pile of dust. So after using it four times I end up with a 14mm wood instead of 22, and a work bench covered in wood particles. Nice.
Back to the hand saw, 8 columns of 10mm done. Time to put some holes in them.

Since they're 14 mm wide, I've drawn a line 7mm from the top, and a vertical line right in the center. For the drilling, enter tool nr 3:

It's my trusty Dremel in the Dremel Workstation. Perfect for drilling some perfectly vertical holes.

Spot on, right through the center! That's just a 3mm drill, but the hole needs to be 5mm. I enlarged the holes using my cordless drill. The existing hole will guide the larger drill, so the hole remains in the center.

Then it's simply a matter of drawing a few lines on the base plate. The lines are spaced 25mm apart and there are two lines crossing them to mark the sides of the colums. Those are 14mm apart and 15mm from the edge.

Add glue, apply pressure. This is the fast drying type, takes about 15 minutes to cure. Tightening and loosening the clamps needs to be done carefully. Add the center clamp first, then the outer ones. Don't tighten them completely right away, but tighten each one a bit and move to the next. Removal is done in reverse order (center one last).

In the mean time, I created a small jig for bending the LED's legs.

Simply insert the LED, bend the legs, and press another piece of wood on top. Easy! The front and back plate are done as well:

The outer holes are 14mm apart, the center hole is 7mm above the outer holes.
After the glue has dried, it's time to drill a couple of holes from the bottom into the colums. Again, I used the Dremel for this to make sure the holes are perfectly vertical and spot on down the center of the colums.

Let's put in some screws. It's important to put a load of pressure on the columns so they won't start to rotate when you put the screws in. Clamping the whole thing down seems to work pretty well. The front and back plate had the same treatment.

And after about 3.5 hours it's done! Let's put in some LEDs!

 Nice! Works like a charm, now let's cut the three wires so we can pull the pillar out of the jig.

No problems there, plenty of room!

That's usable, may need a bit of bending, but not bad!

And it works!

Compared with the one from the first jig (at front). The space between the LEDs and the cathode wires has become a lot smaller (20mm to 14mm) and the distance between the LEDs has been reduced from 30mm to 25, awesome.

The next step is rigging up a framework to test a pillar. I'll probably just use one shift register to turn on each anode sequentially while sourcing one of the cathodes. After cycling through all anodes it'll move to the next cathode. So it'll first light up all reds, then all greens, then all blues and then all reds again, all in a matter of a few seconds.Guess I'll wire up an AtTiny on a protoboard to make it a semi permanent setup, I just need to get my hands on a dozen alligator clips :)