Lite Brite LED clock

Step 4: Layout and place LED's

Now we are going to layout the LED's on our Lite Brite.  I did a quick drawing on the white board that you can see below.  With this design, you will need 13 LED's for each of three numbers, 5 LED's for the one, and two LED's for the colon.

The first step is to use your Lite Brite pegs to figure out how you will position your LED's.

Once you have a very good idea how you will position the LED's, put your black paper in.  Now we will punch holes in every position that an LED will be in.  Use a Lite Brite peg to make the holes.  Be very careful to make sure you are punching holes in the right places.  As you can tell from the picture below, I was not careful enough, and had several mistakes.  I ended up patching these holes with very small pieces of construction paper and glue, and it came out fine.

Once you have all the holes punched, go ahead and stick your first row of LED's in, and splay the leads to hold them in place.