To start off, I have the drawing skills (yes straight lines) of a carrot, maybe less so. My current project is to make a ws2812b matrix clock, and because I don't want to solder 30032=1800 individual joints, i have to work with more or less the dimensions on the strip.
Okay, now here's the things I want to do and what's wrong.
This is the led strip I am using ( 60 led per meter one)
So by this image, I have to make roughly 16.54x16.54 mm cubes for each led, minus the 3mm thickness of the board I'm going to use to create the shape.
I am trying to find software that would let me create the "outlines" for the design, which I can print and paste to my board and then glue the pieces of the board according to the print.
I spent a whole morning trying this on easyeda, but it failed miserably.
I thought things were going well when i could work with the accurate mm's..
** the thick horizontal black lines were meant to be where i would place the strips, and the thinner vertical ones were supposed to be the one where i would place the board pieces, I figured this wouldnt work and thats why there isnt another thin horizontal strips.Oh, the toplayer.pdf is the dimensions i want to cut my board into, from a bigger piece of board
There's a free program called Dia that I've used in the past on Windows. It's a lot like MS-Visio and makes it easy to create objects of fixed sizes for printing.
Okay.. I downloaded dia first, lacked some features so moved to libre office
Anyways, Can someone help me a bit with the calculations? Im trying to get cube shapes for each leds but some how end up getting rectangle shapes when i factor in the 3mm thickness of the board.
36 leds horizontally, so 16.54mm between each led
8 rows of the above parallel and horizontal, i can change the distance between each strip freely.
What am i missing? I tried calculating as 16.54*16.54 cubes, minus the 3mm on each side. still get a rectangular shape instead of a cube one.
kaseftamjid:
Anyways, Can someone help me a bit with the calculations? Im trying to get cube shapes for each leds but some how end up getting rectangle shapes when i factor in the 3mm thickness of the board.
I can't visualize that. Maybe you can make a simple pencil sketch and post a photo of it.
The black portion is the strip and the green glitter gel is the cardboard pieces. Im trying to get an equal cube shape for each led. So roughly each led is equally distant from the other and sit in the center of a cube shape. I cant change the distance between each horizontal leds, but can change the distance between vertical ones.
Ok, so I think I understand what you are trying to create. It looks like you are trying to create what I think are called baffles? So each LED has 4 walls around it to stop the light bleeding from one LED "cell" into adjacent ones.
Like @Robin2 says, any vector drawing program should be able to do this for you. Also, any of the free 2D CAD programs should be able to do this as well.
You might find it easier to create a square that is 16.54mm by 16.54mm and then duplicate it butting one up against the other.
markd833:
Ok, so I think I understand what you are trying to create. It looks like you are trying to create what I think are called baffles? So each LED has 4 walls around it to stop the light bleeding from one LED "cell" into adjacent ones.
Like @Robin2 says, any vector drawing program should be able to do this for you. Also, any of the free 2D CAD programs should be able to do this as well.
You might find it easier to create a square that is 16.54mm by 16.54mm and then duplicate it butting one up against the other.
Or maybe I've completely misunderstood!
Yes YES!! that's exactly what im trying to do. I am going to place a diffuser sheet above the whole contraption becaue we cant see eye to eye with leds ( ba dum tss).
I have a fairly large number of leds, 36 in each row and 8 of those in parallel. so 288 leds and 288 baffles. It would be really hard to make these many blocks and not make errors.
For now i cant figure where i am making a mistake that makes my baffles turn out to be rectangular instead of cubes.
kaseftamjid:
Yes YES!! that's exactly what im trying to do. I am going to place a diffuser sheet above the whole contraption becaue we cant see eye to eye with leds ( ba dum tss).
I have a fairly large number of leds, 36 in each row and 8 of those in parallel. so 288 leds and 288 baffles. It would be really hard to make these many blocks and not make errors.
For now i cant figure where i am making a mistake that makes my baffles turn out to be rectangular instead of cubes.
Sorry, but I am still confused.
If the objective is to cut holes in a board (as suggested in Reply #8) and because you are asking about 2D drawing I can't understand what you mean by "baffles turn out to be rectangular instead of cubes". Perhaps you meant to say "squares" rather than "cubes"?
How are you making the baffles?
Can you post a photo of one of the rectangular baffles?
If you do want to cut holes in card (as suggested in Reply #8) and if you don't have access to a laser cutter you could make a cutter from a piece of suitable sized brass tube. Sharpen one end with a small file and file some teeth into the sharp edge. Then mount the tube in an electric screwdriver and "drill" out the holes. I did this to make holes for LDRs to peer through mountboard.
Grumpy_Mike:
These sort of things are best made with a laser cutter and cut out of about 1mm cardboard.
I did a small version of the a few months back. The magazine is free to download and there is a link to the drawings which I made in Inkscape.
This is a video showing some steps in the creation. Tap-A-LED
This is basically what im trying to do. I couldnt find any thinner board, hence the 3 mm. How did you calculate the box(baffle) dimensions? laser cutter huh... must be nice to have one
If the objective is to cut holes in a board (as suggested in Reply #8) and because you are asking about 2D drawing I can't understand what you mean by "baffles turn out to be rectangular instead of cubes". Perhaps you meant to say "squares" rather than "cubes"?
How are you making the baffles?
Can you post a photo of one of the rectangular baffles?
If you do want to cut holes in card (as suggested in Reply #8) and if you don't have access to a laser cutter you could make a cutter from a piece of suitable sized brass tube. Sharpen one end with a small file and file some teeth into the sharp edge. Then mount the tube in an electric screwdriver and "drill" out the holes. I did this to make holes for LDRs to peer through mountboard.
...R
check out the youtube link grumpy_mike posted, at 0:22 seconds, He shows what im trying to make. I cant decide on the height yet because my diffuser sheet is steel on the way, but i need to figure out the width and length, also while compensating the 3mm thickness of my board
You can look directly at an LED, if it is too bright just turn the brightness down by software.
Without a light baffle ( or waffle as it is sometimes called ) there are no sharp edges to the lights. Sometimes this can look nicer.
I am not quite clear where the 3mm for the board comes into anything.
If you don’t have access to a laser cutter then it might be simpler to mark out where to drill holes in a sheet of plywood and place that on top the LEDs with the diffuser on top of that. Mind you that will produce circles of light not square ones, unless you use a square drill. This is not a joke these are called mitre drills.
This is a drawing of an 8 by 8 waffle ( or egg box as they are sometimes called ) I did for an existing board.
The slots in the pieces go half way through, The slot spacing should be the same for horizontal and vertical pieces to get a square box.
The bottom peaces also have a small notch in the bottom. There were to skip over the small surface mount capacitors there were on the board at this point. If you make the crossing point the copper pads on the strip then you will not need this and you will end up with what looks like a comb where the pieces slot into each other.
I did these drawings in Inkscape. Basically do one piece and duplicate it as many times as you need.
I also use MacDraft as a vector drawing package which I have sometimes used to export to a PDF file for laser cutters that take PDF inputs. The problem with PDF is there is no agreement on scale and you have to apply a custom scale factor.
You can look directly at an LED, if it is too bright just turn the brightness down by software.
Without a light baffle ( or waffle as it is sometimes called ) there are no sharp edges to the lights. Sometimes this can look nicer.
I am not quite clear where the 3mm for the board comes into anything.
If you don’t have access to a laser cutter then it might be simpler to mark out where to drill holes in a sheet of plywood and place that on top the LEDs with the diffuser on top of that. Mind you that will produce circles of light not square ones, unless you use a square drill. This is not a joke these are called mitre drills.
Still.. Still on the way. 5050 leds are pretty bright and would look quite bad without a diffuser, and i plan to buy a 30Amp 5V supply to power it at full brightness.. Its gonna be pretty awesome if i can pull it right.
I lucked out with an industrial diffuser sheet provider, so im not talking about any makeshift(many acrylic sheets are used this way in diy projects, as you already know) diffuser sheet, literal diffuser sheet.
The main problem is because the board is thick, cant say too thick, but definitely thick enough to be taken under consideration.
Spent a few hours figuring out LibreOffice and made the 2d template? ( stencil? outline? what is it supposed to be called )
Now for the egg box..
PS. why cant i upload the .prn file?
Grumpy_Mike:
This is a drawing of an 8 by 8 waffle ( or egg box as they are sometimes called ) I did for an existing board.
The slots in the pieces go half way through, The slot spacing should be the same for horizontal and vertical pieces to get a square box.
The bottom peaces also have a small notch in the bottom. There were to skip over the small surface mount capacitors there were on the board at this point. If you make the crossing point the copper pads on the strip then you will not need this and you will end up with what looks like a comb where the pieces slot into each other.
I did these drawings in Inkscape. Basically do one piece and duplicate it as many times as you need.
I also use MacDraft as a vector drawing package which I have sometimes used to export to a PDF file for laser cutters that take PDF inputs. The problem with PDF is there is no agreement on scale and you have to apply a custom scale factor.
It is not one of the file types the forum supports.
How did you maintain the left to right orientation?
When I draw the first one I then group it to form a single object. Then I duplicate the object and drag them roughly to the right position.
Then I select all the objects and chose the align objects option for what ever edge I want.
My cad package also has an option to distribute objects evenly along a line, so I draw a line of the right length and select it along with the objects I want and distributing them along that line.
That is also the way I make the slots evenly spaced. One U shaped is drawn from three lines, then the lines are selected and grouped, before being duplicated and distributed evenly along the line between the first and last slot.
I don’t use LibreCad to do much except to do file conversion when using a DFX file some one else has drawn and posted on the web.
