Make Your Own Name in LED!

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!

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)

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.

1. LM317T

2. Capacitor 0.1uF, Capacitor 1uF

3. Resistor values: 240Ohm, 330Ohm

4. 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.

5. 6 x 1,5V battery in order to light up all the LED's.

6. 9 x Bolt and nut
7. 2 x hinge
8. 3mm plywood

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

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.

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.

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.

For this project i used a handle I found on thingiverse. I 3D printed this and put it on top of my Casing.

The handle could be found using this link: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:179261

I finished the build by adding a hinge to the top of the box so it could be opened and closed in case something brakes inside the case!

The build is now complete!