One Man Electrical Parade Halloween Costume

Step 6 Solder the LEDs to the driver board

To drive the LEDs I used a design by Paul Badger of ModernDevice. He gives some really good information about his design on his website, but since I had a difficult time finding the chips that he uses, I just ordered a kit that included the necessary components from his site. Many designs that I've seen use multiplexing to light up 64 LEDs. Basically, the circuit lights up half of the LEDs then quickly switches to light up the other half. This happens so quickly that you won't notice it flickering, but it does reduce the overall brightness. Paul's design doesn't need to switch between banks of lights. Each one can receive constant power. This results in brighter lights.

So, at this point, I soldered the leads from the LEDs into the underside of the circuit board where Paul intended the LEDs to be soldered in directly. After the wires were soldered into place, I snipped the excess wire that was sticking out of the silkscreened side of the board.