Hand-soldering tiny charlieplexed LEDs

Recently, an awesome blog post found me that started with this sentence:

Have you ever wanted to build a LED matrix display using hand-crafting methods, such as sewing, weaving, or papercraft?

LED multiplexing layouts for hand-crafting by M Rule

I've been itching to wire some tiny surface-mount LEDs in some kind of flexible multi-plexed array since this spring, when I semi-accidentally ended up with 1000 pink LEDs in my posession. In my mind, I was seeing some kind of dense fabric-y geodesic dome.

1000 pink SMD leds on a reel, and a close-up detail shot with tweezers and a finger for scale. they are tiny!

My friend Galen shared excitement about Charlieplexing last year, something I've been vaguely aware of for a while, but never dug into. Its wiki article and M Rule's blog have neat ways to describe Charlieplexing, but the essence of how I now understand it is this:

  1. Every pin connects to every other pin through an LED. Put every pin in INPUT mode so they're electrically disconnected.

  2. To turn on one specific LED, write the pin connected to that LED's cathode (negative side) to output LOW, and the one connected to its anode HIGH.

  3. Double the number of LEDs from there by hooking them up parallel pairs with one turned backward – swap the HIGH for LOW and LOW for HIGH to reverse the current flow, lighting one or the other of any pair.

a 3-wire circuit diagram charlieplexing 6 leds, animated to show how an individual led can be turned on
Circuit diagram from ptkrf on Instructables.

From connect every pin to every other pin, you can get a sense that this lets you control a lot of LEDs with a small number of microcontroller (eg., Arduino) pins.

A column of 30 colourful LEDs flashing in an ascending pattern, standing up in a breadboard.
M Rule's beautiful beaded woven multi-colour Charlieplexed array 😍

So, this seemed like a perfect way to start working through my thousand pink LEDs! I started with the most literal version of the pattern, first with three pins (the first GIF in this post), and then four:

'helping hands' holding bent wires ready to solder the first LEDs

The wires have a nice visual pattern with all wires travelling the same direction on the same side. The LEDs themselves are structural, anchoring between the wires at each intersection and keeping them apart. I wanted to try for a classic under/over weave, so I pulled some multi-strand wire apart and gave it a shot:

seven thin wires weaving around 42 small pink LEDs
I am leaving out my hairball-like actual first try at this :)

I was ambitious, and upped it to 7 pins, for 42 individual LEDs. It was not a perfect success. It's likely that I soldered some shorts I couldn't find, and some of the delicate SMD LEDs may have been physically compromised. I also probably made mistakes orienting the LEDs correctly with all that over/under back-and-forth to keep track of!

Still, I learned a lot! Especially about how hard it can be to debug Charlieplexed arrays. But also, that this weaving pattern creates a really nice visual texture, and the resulting material feels good: sturdy yet flexible.

I'd like to dive deeper in this direction! I want to make bigger meshes, and I want to try other weaving patterns, like twills, or maybe houndstooth? Maybe these can result in glowy-meshy materials with different flexing/stretching properties!

For the time being, I'm falling down several different other rabbit holes from this. In their post, M Rule proposes some fancy alternate layouts for the mesh, still following the same basic pattern:

alternate layout patterns proposed by M Rule for hand-wiring charlie-plexed LED matrices
Really, the post is so good, check it outttt ✨

The cylinder immediately jumps out at me, because it seems like a short gap from there to a sphere! (I spend way too much time thinking about map projections…). A couple neat things going down this path:

It's easier to show this with a picture. Mocked up with five loops of wire:

holding wires in place with alligator clips and helping hands to get five rings in place five rings of thick wire, tilted and rotated so they outline a sphere, with pentagonal holes at the top and bottom. small pieces of tape hold it together.

Promising! Every ring crosses every other ring twice (remember we connect every pin to every other pin twice in charlieplexing!) We could get a bigger array by just fitting in more rings. They sort of tilt-then-rotate in this pattern. I quickly soldered up a test with 20 pink LEDs:

five lumpy wire rings outlining a sphere with LEDs connecting them.

And then I danced a bit.

From here, a number of projects have sprouted! A teaser:

small metal sculpture made of four circular rings connected with glowing pink LEDs. a coin-cell battery is suspended in the centre by resistors. It's a glowy sparkly ball and here's another hint, this project goes in a touch-sensing interactive lil friend direction :)

post script

I've mostly worked on this at InterAccess in Toronto. They have nice soldering irons and stuff, and folks are nice. Come by Wednesday evenings for community nights, it's free!

for myself in the future: MOV -> WEBM crop/scale/not taking a hundred years: ffmpeg -i IMG_5940.MOV -an -vframes 90 -vf crop=1080:768:0:420,scale=600x427 -cpu-used 1 4-wire.webm

more stuff ✨