One Man Electrical Parade Halloween Costume

Step 5 Wire up the LEDs

The LED driver circuit that I went with was was a design from ModernDevice. In that design the LEDs all connect to a common 5 volt lead. After some consulting with my friend Steve (who knows WAY more than I do about electronics) we figured out that I could save myself a lot of soldering by grouping the positive leads of the LEDs. My wiring job was a mess, but you can sort of see that I soldered short jumper wires along the positive leads of each row of LEDs. To each negative lead, I soldered a wire about a foot long. At the end of each row, I soldered another foot long wire to the end of the group of positive leads. I used hot glue to prevent short circuits where the leads from the LEDs looked like they might touch. I also glued the leads to the board to minimize movement. Yes, I'm not very good at soldering. I also made the wires a foot long in anticipation of having to move things around in order to "fix" something later.