LED Dot-Matrix Display

Step 4 Soldering

Once you have the parts, it's time to connect them all together.

The first board I began soldering on was the display board. There were a number of reasons, it looked the most boring, it would be great fun to play with once I'd finished, and it would be boring, wait, did I mention that ?

So once I'd cleaned up the tracks with some wirewool I began cutting and attaching link wires. These were damn fiddly and quite hard to make and then fix in place, so in absence of a dutiful ceramic-fingered assistant I used sellotape, which lead me to the discovery, not for the first time, that burnt sellotape is nasty nasty stuff.

Once this was complete I started soldering the LEDs, I started from the top and worked my way down doing them individually, until I got bored and started on whole rows at once. Towards the end it got quite difficult as the LED leads stuck out quite a way. Once all 20 LEDs were soldered, I attacked the back and snipped off all those pesky leads as far down as I could. And true to my earlier thoughts grabbed a spare 6v battery pack and battery clip and began running the wires up and down the connections lighting up columns. This looked pretty good on it's own, infact, the rest of the project may have been worth it just for this look. Of course for some strange reason whole rows were lighting up together but at this point I didn't quite notice...