n°Garage's LEDO Aims to Be the LEGO of LED PCB Origami Sculptures
Slotting together to build complex structures, each LEDO "brick" has no fewer than 10 individually-addressable LEDs on board.
Pseudonymous maker "n°Garage" has released a compact addressable LED board that is designed to act as a LEGO-style building block for "PCB origami:" the LEDO.
"LEDO is a small LED module for PCB origami [like] a tiny brick for LEGO," n°Garage says of the roughly-triangular board design. "The only difference is that you have to use your soldering iron to build [a] LEDO creation. As a base module, LEDO could be used to create more complex 3D structures, trees, squares, cubes, and so on."
This isn't n°Garage's first attempt at using PCBs for light-up origami-inspired sculptures. Back in early April the maker released the FlexiBall, a soldering kit made up of 20 triangular flexible PCB modules, each of which has four individually-addressable LEDs on board. The LEDO, then, is a logical expansion of the concept — doing away with the flexible PCB in favor of a more traditional rigid substrate.
Being rigid isn't the only way the LEDO differs from the FlexiBall modules, either. Each LEDO is designed to mate with one or more additional LEDOs at a 90-degree angle, slotting together like a wooden sculpture kit. There are a lot more LEDs this time around too: rather than four per module, each LEDO board has 10 WS2812B-2020 RGB LEDs — four on the top, three on the bottom, and another three on the non-connected edges.
LEDO boards are now available from n°Garage's Tindie store priced at $18 for a hand-assembled two-pack — one module of which has a flat flexible cable (FFC) connector fitted to interface with your choice of LED driver.