I wanted to buy as few things as necessary for this project. This turned out to be

• Transparent PLA
• 2 perf boards (proto boards? whatever the correct name is)
• 15x 4 OpAmps
• a bunch of wire

The project started when the contest was announced. I only recently discovered the podcast (and the rest of the community) and got a fire lit under my but.

The first thing i did was print out the bread board. the first one had walls that were too thick so did it again with one layer walls, floor and roof. I cannibalized the metal insides from an existing breadboard.

at first i wanted to use a micro controller but couldnt figure out how to get 60 adc readings.

The opamps are to make sure the activity on the board isn't bothered by the lights. Opamps were purchased and soldered onto a perfboard with ones next to each other fliped so that the Vin and "ground" pins could be connected more easily. The + input of an opamp would become the signal input  and the output was connected to the - pin and would in future connect to an LED. Somehow.

Connecting power was pretty easy. Though some hot glue needed to be used in a case of melted isolation.

The following took place over the last 2-3 days.

electrical sigval from the bradboard acieved by soldering a wire to the perfboard and making the dot of solder touch a line. this was unreliable. Alternative plan. solver a full line for each signal and sand them down to be level with each other. this works better. Now the breadboard is attached to a perfboad.

Next up, stuff all the LEDs into the perfboard and breadboard. solder the - side of all of them together.next. solder a resistor to each positive LED leg. Then to each resistor a white wire. heatshrink the exposed bits. twist together matching led wire and line wire. stare in dread at the upcoming rats nest.

now connect the two perfboards. This will look insane and take most of the day.

solder in a battery connector and connect the ground between the LEDs and the OpAmps. some wires have fallen out but at this point your happy as long as the lights turn on

realize you didn't test ANYTHING before.

Test using 5V on power supply.

It doesn't work. In fact it reaches the current limit. none of the leds are on.

realize you messed up on the V+ and V- on the opamps.

quick fix.

test again. lights turn on

celebrate and show off the rats nest to the world

For the future

For V2 alllll this stuff will move onto a PCB