LED Sign

Just a Sign for descriptions for Events. We had the challenge to make descriptions for exhibition pieces which should look nice in brad daylight, but also be readable in dark environments. Of course, that lead to incude WS2812 strips. A first version with just laser engraved acrylic was not very good readable - to much text on small space. So we changed it to a printed version.

You just need a tiny bit of 4mm poplar, a bit of wood veneer (the poplar would also work, but with veneer as back plate it will be thinner and nicer). Then 3mm acryl for the shield itself, and a bit of WS2812 LED strip and a controller. We used our own, https://www.instructables.com/StripNanite/ , so either you have to make it yourself or put a bigger controller at the end of a power cord outside the sign holder.

Setup is easy. First laser cut some pieces out of 4mm poplar (design files can be found here: https://github.com/JanThar/Signs). Then glue them together, with a LED strip and the controller (obviously soldered at the strip) sandwhiched in between. The thin rectangle will be the backside, where the strip will be glued onto it. The very thin cutout will be the borders around the strip and be a distance spacer such that the led sign would not lay flat on the ground and might even stand upright. Finally, the wood rectangle with the 3mm cutout will be placed ontop of the LED strip, where the acrylic will be later inserted.

As a programm we use the FastLED colorpalette example again, uploaded via the Arduino IDE after changing the port to 0 and number of LEDs to 9 leds with maximal brightness (255).

The shield itself will be lasercut out of 3mm acrylic. You can of course also use other forms than the rectangle, and also use laser engraved images. In our case we printed text with white (well, marmorized) background color directly on the acrylic, the wonders of UV-inkjetprinters. More accesible solutions would be just a normal print on paper glued behind or the aformentioned laser engraving.

Enjoy!