(September 2015)

Once I had the boards on order from Dirty PCB, I also put together the digikey and AliExpress orders for the components. AliExpress was by far the cheapest way to get the LEDs. I spent a fair bit of time looking at different vendors and calcuating total price per LED including shipping. I planned to use DHL China for speed, so that helped narrow the vendors. AliExpress vendors commonly do the "EBay Trick" where the cost is cheap and the shipping is expensive to show better in the listings. If you were planning to pay a lot for shipping anyway, then these can actually be pretty good deals. I ordered 300 LEDs froma vendor that claimed $4/100, and with express shipping, it came out to just above the normal price for the LEDs.

Things started arriving later in the month. PCBs:

Digikey parts added to my project box

I assebled the back side of a single board to see how thing looked

And then we wait for the LEDs...