Enterprise LED Display

thingiverse

A buddy of mine recently got his hands on a Glowforge and I asked him to etch a picture into a 98mm x 98mm x 2.9mm piece of acrylic that I like. He did a great job making the etching with the acrylic in hand, so I designed this display case to hold the piece of acrylic and hide a short LED strip. I soldered two wires to the end of a short 5V LED (cool white) strip - bought a wire bundle with two wires inside. Soldered the other end of the wire to a standard USB plug insert, making sure "+" on the LED Strip was connected to Pin 1 and "-" was soldered to pin 4. Next, I enclosed the standard USB insert into its housing. Then, I verified that the LED Strip lit up when the USB plug was plugged in. Lastly, I inserted the other end of the LED strip down through the underside slot of the main body with the LEDs facing towards the opening and re-verified that they lit up when plugged into a USB port. I scaled the logo to the size indicated for the partial circles and printed out two mirror reverse copies of the logo using a color laser printer (inkjet won't work). Then, I used the Mod Podge technique (https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1821975) to image transfer the logo onto the display End Pieces (two pieces). After the image transfer was completed and cleaned up, I glued the End Pieces onto the ends of the main body. After the glue dried, I verified that everything worked. I inserted the etched acrylic piece into the slot and plugged it into a USB port. UPDATE - I cut into the wire in the center and added a rocker switch so I can plug into a USB port and then turn on and off without unplugging it. You can pick your own image to etch if you have access to the right equipment. You can select your own image to attach to the End Pieces. Please share if you do use the model and how you might have customized it. This is a fun graphic design, electrical engineering, and 3D printing project. No supports were used in the printing of these parts. The End Pieces were rotated to lay flat on their back side before slicing. Printed out of PLA with a layer height of 0.2mm and 20% infill.