Making LED Panels
Our original plan was to make our led panels out of protoboards, but we've decided to switch to PCBs for a few reasons:
Etching the protoboard is time consuming. (The first try took ~5 hours and even after deciding to using wires to jump the space instead of the pre-connected paths production of each board still took almost two hours)
One of our major goals is ease of use---if these boards break and need to be replaced, we want something that is easy to make. The Huang Lab at Olin (who are getting our culture keeper at the end of the semester) already has PCBs designed for this purpose, so we've altered our attachment design a bit to be more compatible with their equipment.
Even though we're changing our design to fit PCBs, we're still making the four protoboards as proof of concept and to help demo and test our system. Time and budget constraints prevent us from ordering PCBs at this point since three of these boards (shown above on the right) cost around $100.