evakhoury · 332 points · 50 comments · 2 days ago · Open original
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THthrowaway219450yesterday
Very cool. 5-fold symmetry on the PCB to use up the board allowance is particularly neat.
A trick that poor hobbyists learn early on is to make pads a little larger than necessary for SMT parts so you've got somewhere to wick solder onto. Neopixels (5050 LEDs) are reasonable to hand-solder since the pads extend up the sides of the package, but you can also do QFNs with a bit of practice by placing a big via to get to the central pad from underneath.
XRXRGyesterday
Love how the 5 PCBs slot into each other to form the final shape.
With respect to the assembly: do yourself a massive favor and let the PCB fab also assemble the LEDs. With a simple bill of materials like this it will add very little cost, it saves you a _lot_ of time, and it might also reduce the chance of component damage from adding too much heat or from accidental ESD strikes. (I don’t know how much these Neopixels can handle, though.)
LUlukeifyyesterday
Cool! Remarkably similar to Voria Labs who produce a product called Lumanoi https://voria.com/
Perhaps an example of convergent evolution? :)
RErealoyesterday
Well...
I bought one of those some time ago.
Might interest the HN crowd...
https://www.evilgeniuslabs.org/one-inch-fibonacci128
PEpetsfedyesterday
Because I desperately want to make my own (and maybe modify it a bit to fit my own hardware biases), I found the repo for the hardware:
https://github.com/jagnat/fib_quintant_minimizer
It would be really neat if the author could put the relevant licensing stuff on there.
(but mainly, I want to hear about how they accomplished 5-fold symmetry!)
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Very cool. 5-fold symmetry on the PCB to use up the board allowance is particularly neat. A trick that poor hobbyists learn early on is to make pads a little larger than necessary for SMT parts so you've got somewhere to wick solder onto. Neopixels (5050 LEDs) are reasonable to hand-solder since the pads extend up the sides of the package, but you can also do QFNs with a bit of practice by placing a big via to get to the central pad from underneath.
Love how the 5 PCBs slot into each other to form the final shape. With respect to the assembly: do yourself a massive favor and let the PCB fab also assemble the LEDs. With a simple bill of materials like this it will add very little cost, it saves you a _lot_ of time, and it might also reduce the chance of component damage from adding too much heat or from accidental ESD strikes. (I don’t know how much these Neopixels can handle, though.)
Cool! Remarkably similar to Voria Labs who produce a product called Lumanoi https://voria.com/ Perhaps an example of convergent evolution? :)
Well... I bought one of those some time ago. Might interest the HN crowd... https://www.evilgeniuslabs.org/one-inch-fibonacci128
Because I desperately want to make my own (and maybe modify it a bit to fit my own hardware biases), I found the repo for the hardware: https://github.com/jagnat/fib_quintant_minimizer It would be really neat if the author could put the relevant licensing stuff on there. (but mainly, I want to hear about how they accomplished 5-fold symmetry!)