Spaceport Arcade

For various reasons I've taken on the daunting task of building a full size astromech droid.  I haven't quite decided at this time if it's going to be a replica of the famous R2 or some other astromech from the Star Wars franchise.  Either way, it's going to force me to learn new things and work with various materials, many of which I have little to no previous experience.

Over the last few weeks I managed to bring together the parts necessary to build the dome logic displays. In the world of replica astromech droid builders, the Teeces are an array of boards and LED's controlled by an Arduino to reproduce the familiar logic displays mounted in the droid's dome.  The pcbs were from OSH Park, the leds from china, and the other components I ordered from Digikey. Here is a shot of the Teeces boards from OSH Park.

Last night I started adding the components to the rear logic display.  This required loading a bit of code up to an Arduino Pro Mini.  Then a few led driver chips were soldered to the main board and the Arduino was mounted on the back.  I started the process of adding the LED's to the board and testing each one. Everything was looking good, but I ran out of time.  It's a tedious task to add all these tiny LED's to the board and check each for polarity.  Hopefully tonight I can get them soldered in place.