And another thing using led strips. This time it's a grid to be used with 30 leds/meter led strips. It's meant for people who are looking for a fast way to build a led screen from led strips. A arduino sketch is provided but that's about it, this is not for first time led diy-ers. And there's no electronic case, side covers, wall mounts or anything.

Strip shouldn't be thicker than ~1mm between leds. Cutouts in the base are 12.25mm wide so WS2812B/APA102/others should fit.

The grid is 200.1mm x 133.4mm x 16.675mm (6 x 4 cells). The outer walls are tapered so it can be tiled. Paper/diffusive material needs to be cut to 130mm x 196mm. There's not much room for error there... ^^

I suggest building the grid and screwing it to something flat. The connectors are not meant to hold the whole grid.

Using the vertical base gives 4x6 pixels - so this may be usable when building counters (3 pixels width per digit 0-9 + 1 pixel spacing)

The grid is tapered so the front can be mounted without destroying the ability to tile seamlessly. Diffusive material can be put in between but has to be cut very precisely.

Grid Type B is meant to be put right behind something. Canvas, painted Glas, whatever. To keep cells as big as possible this is the one to go. No screws can be put in from the top and the front will not fit! Screw holes are 8,5mm deep on type b.

Screw hole diameter is 2.85mm, it'll take M3 screws to mount the grid.

Printing grid/grid type b in vase mode is possible, but not necessary. There's only 1 retract per layer, so I wonder how good it'll print from flexible materials...

Various

No

No

0.2 - 0.3

0% - 30%

Walls are multiples of 0.6mm, so I strongly recommend using an extrusion width/line width (not nozzle diameter) of 0.6mm when printing this!

Printing the grid in vase mode using a layer height of 0.3mm and extrusion width of 0.6mm at 65mm/s results in print times just slightly under 60 minutes (S3D is pretty accurate on this since 4.1.1). Be careful, 0.3/0.6/65mm is quite demanding to the extruder and filament feed...

Oh, speaking of it. It seems S3D 4.1.1 has a bug in vase mode which results in overextrusion on the last loop. 4.0.0 handles this correctly. I may update this as soon as support answers the next time...

So I printed it at normal layer mode - doesn't make a difference timewise, there's only up to 1 retract per layer (between Z changes).

Scaling the parts along Z is possible but go too low and the front might be hard or impossible to clip on (type b is limited by screw hole depth).

The base/front parts can be printed in under 30 minutes. I only used 1 top layer on the base parts and 30% infill. They are more like meshes, have a look at the photos down below somewhere...

kek

Sample Sketch will work with:

• Arduino (Nano, Pro Mini, UNO)
• FastLED library
• WS2812B leds
• minimum x: 4 / y: 6 pixels for example to work
  (4x6 = 1 module vertical or 6x8 = 2 modules horizontal)
• Horizontal zig-zag, data in at bottom left corner

The sketch provides basic setPixel(x, y) routines, an array of digits (0-9) and a possible way to use them.

The sketch from this: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2930831
should work with slight modifications:

• RESX/RESY at least 18x8 (6 modules, 3x2) or 16x6 (4 modules, 4x1)
• Replacing setPixelXY with the one from the basic sketch here

Electronics can be taken 1:1 or from here: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3241802
or there (video): https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3095715

I'd recommend the following steps:

• tape base parts together as needed
• mark/drill holes on wood/board
• glue in / solder leds
• mount grid using screws/connectors from underneath

-

Time to put the parts together. 9x Grid on horizontal base, front on them and all screwed through foamboard/connectors on the backside.

I'm surprised at how well the canvas works as diffusive material. Top right corner shows inkjet film, lower right corner regular copy paper.

Top right and above pictures show grid type a + horizontal base + front. Grid type b will maximze cell size and give black lines as thin as on the lower right (without "black dot"/visbile screw hole). Or said in numbers: type a = 7.2mm cell size, type b = 1.2mm cell/cell, 2.4mm grid/grid.

Das ... ist das ... Haus .. vom Ni....