Artificer Dice v4.0 Dev Log 4 - Hybrid LED Strip

Initially I had planned on using a folding flexible PCB to fold the LED array into its icosahedron shape, however the cost of flexible PCB’s was WAY out of my prototyping budget. While I would like to move to that eventually, I did need to figure out a way to get a similar folded icosahedral structure into the dice. My solution, as detailed in my previous post, was to have a single LED module that featured connectors at a 60° angle. While I thought I could be clever and have a double-sided PCB, it turns out it is a LOT harder to do that in ECAD for a variet of reasons. I had to scrap my first order once I realized the mistake I had made, and redesign it.

A single-layer PCB designed to meet 60° angles while maintaining serial communication.

This design was cut down the middle to separate the two halves, and could be flipped depending on which way the curvature needed to go to make the icosahedral net. Assembly was a minor headache, as I had to solder each one individually, but I made a little wire guillotine to help cut and strip the exact wire lengths I needed (this version was an older one from when I attempted to do this with rectangular LED modules). The final result is rather spectacular…

The Hybrid LED strip partially folded into one half of an Icosahedron.