Dot Matrix Business Card

Step 4 An ad-hoc double sided board

Lay some fine strips of 'invisible tape' down along the vertical PCB traces next to each column of LEDs - this will stop the wires we are about to solder touching them.

Next, solder some fine tinned copper wire along the top of each row of LEDs, to reach all the way to the resistor as in the photo. Note that you will need only four wires - the top one will not be needed if you use the PCB layout given in this article, as it uses a PCB trace to connect the components.

Comments

[CHANNIHONEY]

channihoney says:
how can write new message this display ?

[glocketz]

Can you please elaborate on this step?

[tomward]

Really we are soldering some horizontal wires across the board to conenct the components. The tape is just to insulate the copper traces underneath from touching the wires. You may find it useful to download the image and then zoom in a little with a graphics programme to see how it works. From your comment elsewhere about a PCB it looks like you are getting one commercially made - in this case you can probably dispense with the tape as a commercial board will usually have an insulating "Solder Mask" over the copper tracks. Also the ".BRD" file I have uploaded in step 8 is actually a double-sided one, so this whole step using the tape/wire won't be needed, but as mentioned in this step, there have been a couple of other changes as well, so check out the last paragraph of step 8 carefully.

[macgeek10]

A very ingenious design you have come up with there for your ad hoc 2nd layer i thought of that a while ago and implemented it on a larger scale (16 x 24) led matrix, but it looks like you have the programming skill and also the time to get your design up much faster, all i have built is my display :-\