LED + Display

So, got the display I’m using USBD480, it’s a 4.3″ 480×272 TFT display connected via USB. The enclosure is designed for this display, and it fits perfectly

It all looked good when previewing on the PC, I wasn’t sure how it would turn out on the printer, so I sliced and printed

As you can see, it fits the screen perfectly, there are brackets for the screen, this enclosure has those areas marked perfectly and the display literally clicked into place. The cut out for the screen itself for visibility looks to be spot on as well!

The LEDs – something smart was done here, but I have seen the same method used on other LED displays… It actually houses 16 LEDs, the PCU-8D only has 15, this has the space for the 16th LED, we just ignore it on SimHub 🙂

So my plan was to use one of those 144 LED/per meter strips from Amazon, using WS2812b individually programmable LEDs as they were cheap and easily available, this didn’t quite work out for me, the strip itself is slightly too wide for the cut strip to fit. I ended up slicing a few thin layers off to get them to fit, but then faced an issue with lining up the LEDs to the correct holes. This meant I needed to get the correct LEDs, which are ‘CJMCU-2812-8‘. I got some from Amazon.

Luckily, I was sent 2 of the CJMCU-2812-8’s, which is all I needed. I soldered the GND, DIN, 4-7VDC to the GND, DOUT, 4-7VDC accordingly. I then checked to see if they were going to fit

So the next part to this would be those ‘4’ LEDs on either side, I tried resorting back to my 144/m strip and knew it wouldn’t work. So I had to go and buy ‘CJMCU-354 4’, and once these arrived from China, I was quite pleased, but then had to think about how I would run these from 1 Arduino (rather than filling the wheel with them). I was given advice from ‘Meekstaaa‘ on SimHub who suggested to just run them in series, so from the 1 Arduino I’d really have 4+8+8+4 = 24 LEDs, but only 21 visible.

All seemed to work, I did some tests with the 3 LED sets, but I haven’t configured them quite yet but I did manage to play around with the display on SimHub, I used this dashboard which funnily enough was created by the same person who made the models 🙂