Versions (PCB Designs)
Over the years I've tweaked the design of the LED and AVR boards slightly to help make assembly or manufacture simpler. Here's a rundown of all the variants!
This behemoth was seen at Droidcon 2. Using off-the-shelf RGB LED matrixes, and a ridiculous amount of fiber-optic cable. This is where we started to move away from the Teeces name, as these were significantly different beasts. Thankfully Michael Erwin encouraged me to design my own LED boards, making the whole assembly much less chonky.
Original Run : December 2013
The LED boards are noticeably different from all the other runs. In an effort to keep pricing down I made them modular, so the rear logic LED board is actually made up of two 48 LED boards soldered together. The fronts are the same 48 LED boards, though only 40 of those are actually used (the AVR board tells one row from each board to sit it out). These were all Oshpark purple boards, and the back of the boards sported the Royal Engineers of Naboo (REON) logo.
These used AVR Boards, similar to an Arduino UNO. Due to memory limits with the 328P chip, one AVR Board was used to run the front logics, and a separate AVR Board was used for the rear. Each sported a microSD card reader that was never used (I had wanted SD cards to hold fancy animation scripts, but lacked any coding skill to make it happen).
The Sequel : September 2014
This time around the modular LED board idea was scrapped. The rear logic LED board became a single PCB with 96 LEDs and Kenny's photo/McQuarrie artwork on the back. The front LED logic LED boards (V7.0) became a little smaller and have C3PO artwork on the back. Plastics and hardware also changed slightly this run - since the LED boards were more symmetrical some of the plastics no longer needed the cuts to indicate orientation.
The Revengening! : June 2015
For this run the front LED boards (now V7.1) were made slightly smaller to try and help with difficulties that some builders were having with mounting the previous version. In many cases the front logics get mounted so close together that there's just not enough space to have them both on top of each other; so a tiny amount was trimmed from the bottom of the front LED board to help with this. The rear LED board and AVR board remained unchanged.
This run was an all new design, featuring smaller LEDs (SK6812), simpler fiber-optic placement, a more powerful single driver board (the Teensy Reactor) and easier mounting. The rear LED board features Death Star plan artwork blatantly stolen from the Haynes Death Star Owners Manual by Chris Reiff & Chris Trevas. Because LED spacing is tighter, the overall fiber-optic assemblies became much more compact.
The front assembly also benefited from the smaller LEDs. The number of different screws and spacers was reduced, making the whole assembly process a lot easier.
The Teensy Reactor board was a huge step up from the old 328P AVR Boards. I also moved over to using more trustworthy Pololu voltage regulators.
Enter The Zero : August 2018
The Teensy Reactor board was replaced with a "Reactor Zero", based on the Arduino Zero design with an Atmel SAMD21. My own horrible firmware was eventually replaced with Neil Hutchison's great work.
The Reactor Zero went through a few minor design changes through its lifespan. Voltage-dividing resistors were added to the serial Rx pins, to make it 5V tolerant and simpler to receive serial commands from a Marcduino. I also offered a little adapter board to add these resistors to older boards. In 2020 the LED board pin headers went from 3-pin to 4-pin to better support the new Imahara rear LED board.
Sometime around autumn 2017 I was requested to supply lighting systems for a more industrial application. Not many ended up going out in the real world, but this was an interesting few months. All boards were conformal coated for weather resistance, and I did a little test by submerging running boards into water for a few hours.
Imahara Edition Rear Logic : Late 2020
Not much changed for a long time. Then rear LED board was updated to squeeze in more LEDs, to be more screen accurate. Working with Philip Wise, we also worked out a way for the rear assembly to work with his curved rear logic assembly as an extra option. I also offered an update kit with just the rear assembly parts for anyone wanted to go curved. For prototyping, I converted a 3D printer into a pick-and-place machine to help with the monotonous job of placing all those LEDs (ironically it would have been much faster for me to place them manually than develop this monster, but it was a fun sidetrack).
During development of this rear board, Grant Imahara very sadly and unexpectedly passed away. As a tribute, a portrait of Grant was added to the back of the PCB and a portion of every sale has been donated to the Grant Imahara STEAM Foundation ever since. I haven't mentioned or shown the PCB artwork in any of the forum threads, intending it to be a nice surprise for builders.
WReactor32 : October 2021
Chip shortages made the Reactor Zero impossible to make, but ESP32 modules seemed unaffected, so we pivoted to using an off-the-shelf ESP32 board (a Lolin D32 Pro). Firmware was written by Skelmir, and wifi fanciness was introduced.
