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My various things that glow.
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I had sheets of glow-in-the-dark vinyl for use as a table decoration at events and had been meaning to cut it into strips to turn into a display of sorts.  I found a nice printer on the sidewalk perfect for rescuing parts from.  3D printer, maybe?.  Or the paper feed mechanism would be perfect to feed some glow vinyl constantly.  So I set down to build a simple addressable UV LED strip as a "print head".  Just using 12 8b latching shift registers, 96 2012mm UV LEDs and the same amount of limiting resistors, drive transistors.

The UV print head took about a week of lazily soldering it together and assuming my blind shift register wiring worked based on the datasheet - it did, first try!  Cuting the vinyl into strips, coating the backside with flour to remove they stickyness, and removing the too-small guides from the printer feed mechanism took just a couple hours.  I made new "guides" with bits of wire tied at the edges.  The motor from this particular printer is a simple DC drive, not a stepper as expected! As an after-thought I added a MOSFET to allow me control over when the feed motor turns on and off in code, to pause after messages.  Under testing, it drew less than 1 Amp at 5VDC!










Sightings:
  • Maker Faire 2016 @ San Mateo County Expo Center, San Mateo, CA
    Fri-Sun 16.05.20-16.05.22
Suit design(s), panel design(s), images and content created by and copyright © 2008-2024 Erik Johnson uness otherwise noted.
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