I think this is one of the first strips I made because of all the charring on the LED edges. Now that I’m not using hot air on them anymore, the charring is non-existent.
Woah, dense. These are poi, right? What are you powering them off?
Do you know about http://www.flowtoys.com/? Hardy gear but they’re not doing any particularly sophisticated POV stuff as far as I know (though I haven’t looked in detail recently.) I owe some friends in Singapore a POV wand, but I can’t work through in my head where I’d put the batteries/electronics such as to balance it properly.
Single Li-Ion battery. I have seen Flow Toys’ site and as far as I can tell, no POV. My design is loosely based on Pyrotera’s Visual Poi, except with more colors and storage space.
What kind/size of li ion? Have you added a constant current driver to bump the li ion output voltage up to 5V or are you letting the driver chips take care of that? What about the (ATtiny?) microcontroller, are they 3.3V versions you’re running off 3.6V?
ATmega MCU runs off of a 5V boost circuitry. The drivers work with 2.7~5.5V and are being fed directly from the battery (which cuts out at 2.8V.) They need more current than the boost circuitry can provide. Those pictures were taken with that setup.
The controller side of the circuit is still being finalized (had to swap out some parts this morning) so there’s still work to be done.
Are the LEDs mounted on a typical circuit board, just longer, or is it a flex board?
@Paul_Russo Apologies for not having responded sooner, I just noticed this post. In this particular prototype, the LEDs are on custom made 0.8mm thick regular PCB material. As it turned out, it’s too thin and they were flexing during reflow. The next generation I’m trying 1.2mm thickness. That will happen after the first round of controller PCBs come in (they left fab house today.)