Decorate your desk or shelf with the colourBoard, and loose yourself into its one hundred hypnotising LEDs.
See video below for a short demonstration.
Works great as a practice kit for someone learning electronics soldering. Soldering iron and other basic equipment is necessary, but only basic skills are needed. There will be plenty of practice in completing this kit.
Available as a kit with two different options for LEDs. One has LEDs that slowly fades between colours, and one has LEDs that simply blink. The slight timing inaccuracy of the fading/blinking makes the LEDs slowly drift away from each other, which gives an illusion of randomness that is hard to move your eyes away from.
You can also get only the PCB and front cover if you want to use your own LEDs. The colourBoard works with any ordinary 5 mm 2-pin LEDs that have some sort of blinking/fading/flickering function.
Can be powered through any USB power source, including an ordinary phone charger or the USB port of your computer. Note: The kit does not come with a power source.
Kit contents:
PCB
Cover PCB
4 stand-offs/spacers and 8 screws for cover mounting
105 colour fading LEDs, or blinking LEDs depending on your choice. 5 spares are supplied for accidents during soldering :-)
100 resistors, 2 KΩ
1 mini-USB connector
1 mini-USB cable
1 slide switch
Assembly instructions
The colourBoard has been released as Open Source hardware, so if you feel for it, you can get the source files and do your own changes, or get the gerber files and have the board printed yourself at your favourite PCB manufacturer. This link is also where you will find the assembly instructions.
A great rainy weekend soldering project - and great to look
If you like 100 LEDs slowly changing colors this is a fun kit to build. If you are looking to practice your soldering skills and have something to show for it, this is also a great kit to build. The instructions are clear, and spare LEDs and resistors (all are 2K ohm) are included. I built the kit with the LEDs that change colors. There is also a kit with LEDs that blink. I refer to the blinking LED kit as a super computer (tip of the hat to Big Clive on YouTube), and I think of the color changing LEDs as a Quantum super computer. The LEDs move through their color changing cycle very slowly to they are not distracting, though every time you look at the 10x10 matrix the pattern is different.
Thank you very much for your kind words. I'm glad you found the kit useful! Thomas
