Welcome to my first project on instructables!

In this project I am going to make a sign with my own name on it with LED's! In order to make this i am going to make use of a laser cutter, 3D printer and a simple electrical cicuit in order to make the LED's light up. My goal is to make a nice looking case to fit my LED circuit in and make a handle so it is easy to pick the finished project up. Let's get started!

Step 1: Making a Rough Sketch

Before starting this project I made a simple sketch of what parts i wanted to make and came up with an idea on how i was going to make them during the course of this project. (see images)

Step 2: Finding Your Components

For this project we are going to need a couple of compenents in order to light up the LED's properly and make the case.

LM317T
Capacitor 0.1uF, Capacitor 1uF
Resistor values: 240Ohm, 330Ohm
LED lights, The ammount of LED's you need is up to you because every name is different and also need different ammount of LED's in order to spell them.
6 x 1,5V battery in order to light up all the LED's.
9 x Bolt and nut
2 x hinge
3mm plywood

I will show you how to use some of these components in the next step!

Step 3: Power Supply

In order the convert the voltage coming from the 9V battery in to a voltage which can be used by the LED's we need to make a 9V to 3V converter. We are going to do this by using the LM317.

Use the schematic given in the picutures to build it.

R1 is 240Ohms.

R2 is 330 Ohms.

C1 is 0.1uF.

C2 is 1uF.

If we connect the 9Vin to Vin and ground we should mesure a voltage of 3Volts from Vout to ground.

Step 4: Cutting Out the Casing Using the Lasercutter

You can use the file down below for cutting out the case I used. If you want to adjust some things you are going to need to use a program like Inkscape to edit things in the file.

Case.svg
Download

Step 5: Soldering Your Name With LED's

Soldering your LED's is the part which takes the most time in this project. In order to light up all the LED's correctly, they must be connected in parallel. This is done by connecting all the anodes of the LED's to eachother and connecting all the kathodes to eachother.

In this project I am using 4 different soldering boards to write each letter of my name.

When all the wires are connected, the anodes will be connected to the output of the voltage regulator. The ground of the voltage regulator will be connected to the ground of the LED's. I have added an additional on/off switch in order to switch the LED's on and off whenever i want to.