GripeLine by ED

LED Running Light Continue

I've skipped the soldering part, it's essentially painting by numbers so anyone with any soldering ability should be able to do it very easily. I will say a pair of 'Helping Hands' does wonders for this. This picture is how it should finish up (Taken from the maplin site), however I've installed the LEDs with some play on the legs and also not mounted the 9V battery holder, for obvious reasons.

Because I'm wiring a Molex connector on it! This will take power from 5-15v so no problems with plugging it onto the 12v rail. You could pull it off the 5v however, there's no real issue except the amount of juice the resistors have to take down. (I think, I don't really do electronics, I'll probably burn the house down).

As simple as.. plugging it in and testing it. Now it all gets a bit tricky to show you as capturing moving LEDs isn't as easy as it sounds. However, here you can see that I've at least soldered it all together properly.

Without going into too many details about the Laserbay, I took the insides of it out (Jim's gonna kill me, sorry mate..) and just plonked the board straight in. Couple of cable ties will do the job here.. you can also see where I had a little trouble getting the LEDs to line up.. *cough*
Unfortunately, I had a lot of hassle getting an animated GIF of the running lights going, suffice to say that they do what it says on the tin and nicely scrolls along in a variety of formats.

Ok, well that's the thing in, so what do we think?

This kit weighed in at £4.99 which I personally think is peanuts for something which'll let you customise your case. Remember, you could wire up the outputs of this to *anywhere* and to *any* leds. I didn't have any other colours available, but you can all sense blue can't you.. mount the outputs to some transistors and with a bit of savvy it could do allsorts of sequenced control of gadgets in your pc. Maybe in the future I'll do something crazy and post it up.

So, for all of you who want something a little different, check out some of the self assembly kits you can buy and see if you can't personalise your case with a little LED magic.

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