Solar LED Bike Bag

Step 8 Assembling the LED/Pushbutton Switches Part 1: Curling

The idea here is to have what appears from the outside to be an LED you can push to turn something on and off. Or a switch that gives feedback on the status of whatever it is you are switching.

Which basically means sticking a switch and an LED together, back-to-back, so that the "button" part of the switch faces down, away from the LED part of the assembly.

To start, curl the leads of both elements. It is important to keep the distinction between anode and cathode (+ and -, long and short) on the LED, so make sure to apply different curling styles to each leg of the LED. I used square-ish for the positive side, and more circle-ish for the negative. But it was hard to tell the difference sometimes, so I might switch to using triangles and circles in the future. Whatever your convention though, make sure you STICK TO IT!

Make three sets of these. It is much easier, given the size of the elements, to go ahead and wire them up now before gluing them together, rather than attaching them first, then trying to make your way through the gobby mess to the contacts you're supposed to solder in to. But that means we have to their applications ready.