Light-Up PCB Shadow Box Display

A little over a year ago, I started on my PCB making journey with a simple ATtiny85 blinkie. Since then I’ve delved into surface mount components and assembly files, and have even designed a few products that I sell on Tindie. To be honest, I’m shocked that I only started with this pursuit in 2020, given the proliferation of boards around my workshop that I just haven’t yet thrown out.

While these boards could nominally be thought of as clutter, PCBs – even the mistakes – are quite beautiful in their own right. They might be considered testament to today’s digital manufacturing techniques, and my growing, but still fairly basic, skill in this art. What I needed was a way to proudly display these PCBs.

With this in mind I constructed an industrial-style shadow box, complete with overhead LED lighting as seen in the video below. The frame was cut out on my laser, with the bottom consisting of a section of hardboard. Three layers of ¼” MDF are stacked on top of the hardboard, forming a ¾” cavity for the boards and mounted components. These are closed in by a section of acrylic, fastened on with bolts and MDF-embedded nuts.

The original lighting plan was to use a custom battery-powered PCB for control, activating illumination for a set amount of time with the push of a button. After scrapping that idea, I subbed in a Wemos D1 mini ESP8266 board running WLED firmware in order to drive a strip of addressable WS2812B LEDs. With this setup, I'm able to activate a wide variety of colors and patterns with my phone to light up these otherwise unused PCBs. They're now proudly on display as a colorful mini museum of both my successes and failures!