MichelangeLED: a LED display made of wood
Another contribution I gave to the FabFoos project is the electronic score counter, called MichelangeLED.
While building the table we faced the challenge to create a nice score display system. I suggested to use LEDs instead of a physical counter because of the innovative nature of the project.
At first we wanted to put the diodes on the surface of the wood, but I wasn't happy about that idea. So I thought about hiding the LEDs inside the wood without sacrificing the light. The idea was to mill cylinders in the wood leaving only a thin layer of material on the top.
After some test on the Shopbot I found out that the best thinness was 0.6 mm. This was the one used in the final production.
Afterwards I started working on optimizing the electronics. We controlled all the sensors in the table using one Arduino board so I needed to use a couple of 16bit led drivers to control two arrays of 10 leds with the minimum number of digital pins (4).
So I had to design my how piece of electronic. It was the first time for me.
To minimize to cost of the production I created a small printed circuit board for the chip and other small components, while the connection to the diodes was made using copper film cutted using the sign-cutter and then applied on a plywood panel.
[ the best setting for cutting copper film are:
speed: 1cm/s; strenght: 90gf; depth: 0.250mm ]
What I like about this project is that, at the end of the day, it was created using all different tools that I could find in the lab (laser-cutter, milling machine, sign-cutter, modela, soldering).
In the following video you can see the whole process of creating MichelangeLED.
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