Flowerboard LED cube

posted Dec 21st 2011 1:59pm by Brian Benchoff
filed under: led hacks, tool hacks

Here’s a neat 4x4x4 LED cube made with an ElecFreaks Flower Protoboard.

A few days ago, we posted a neat new prototyping board made specifically for SMD work. Instead of the usual ‘holes-with-circles’ protoboard layout, the ElecFreaks team decided to go with a flower-shaped pad. This makes it especially easy to deal with SMD components when building whatever. To demonstrate their new protoboard, ElecFreaks built an awesome-looking 4^3 LED cube. Just look at those solder traces.

The LED cube itself is nothing we haven’t seen before, but the construction of this thing is amazing. The entire build is on the Arduino Mega Flower shield, meaning there are no wires at all. Everything, from the resistors to the transistors, is an SMD component. The only problem now is bending and soldering all those LED leads.

This Flower Protoboard is starting to look more and more interesting; check it out in action after the break.

Comments [6]

tagged: flower board, LED cube, smd

6 Responses to Flowerboard LED cube

kuhltwo says:

December 22, 2011 at 10:06 am

I am waiting for mine to get here. Can’t wait to try it out.

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signal7 says:

December 22, 2011 at 11:48 am

Don’t know about anyone else, but solder bridging is still a wasteful (and expensive, if you’ve priced solder lately) way to wire a prototype circuit.

I usually just grab a length of Cat5 cable and strip it for the inner wires. The individual wires can be stripped down to bare copper and tacked in place using tiny bits of surface mount solder paste. No need to solder the whole length of the wire either.

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Youmans says:

December 22, 2011 at 10:14 pm

Hi signal7
The way you described is indeed a good way to save solder. But we think it should not be limited in this way. So we developed the Flower protoboard. We hope it will make your project looks more neat and beautiful. Please go to our website for more detail information.

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Richard says:

December 23, 2011 at 1:21 am

Dear Flower protoboard compare with traditional protoboard with point-to-point wiring look follow picture. Flower protoboard point-to-point wiring is very clear.

http://www.elecfreaks.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/16.jpg

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HackJack says:

December 22, 2011 at 5:28 pm

$7.90 a pop + $5 shipping? It does not look like something that can be reused. Traditional protoboard can be reused relatively easily.

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Richard says:

December 22, 2011 at 7:14 pm

Hi Jack, thanks for your suggestion.

First, this is our first released flower board, and there are high cost of R&D test. We will effort strive to reduce costs in the future series.

Second,the price is reference such as Sparkfun’s ProtoBoard – Bandicoot（$9.95） and adafruit’s Perma-Proto(9.95) etc.

Whatever thanks for you suggestion and remind us the price problem. We will provide more lower price in next version.

New version Flower ProtoBoard Series support SOIC under our testing. Pease Stay turn ！

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