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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  5mo ago (text post)   589 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for July 22, 2025

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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I finally found a few hours to work on Tron LED lights. Only about halfway done doing it for one helmet. I have a lot of bends to do which means cutting the strip into segments and then cutting wires to size and doing 6 solders.

The workflow for each LED strip segment is

  • cut LED strip to size
  • cut silicone tubing to almost the same size
  • slide strip into tubing
  • tin the contact pads (GND, 12v and DO)
  • solder three wires to the pads
  • hot glue to give a barrier between the pads and introduce some strain relief
  • wrap black electrical tape over the 3:wires to keep them tidy
  • slip a transparent heat shrink tube sliver like an inch long over the spot where the LED strip meets the wires
  • apply heat gun
  • do a similar process to complete the connection to the input side of the next LED strip segment

Guessing I have 3-4 hours to go.

It seems like convenient connectors exist that can join cut segments of LED strips together. That could speed this up significantly but they seem to add a lot of bulk. So, perhaps out for the bike helmets but maybe for the runs I'm going to add to the bikes or other accessories...

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