So other than messing about at pig-themed campsites, and making little city-terrain buildings (project update later) what else has been going on at Nerd Towers, here on the south coast of England?

Well, my tiny LEDs arrived. And, man, are they tiny.

That’s a 0402 LED – the smallest LED currently used in consumer electronics. As you can see from the photo, it’s literally the size of a speck of dust – I didn’t intent to have a speck of dust on my finger, but I’d just been drilling some resin miniatures, so you get an idea for scale – my tiny, stubby, Trump-like hands always make things look bigger 😉

So instead, I thought I’d try the much more sensibly-sized 0603 LEDs instead. Amazingly, I managed to get three of them soldered together with a common cathode (or was it common anode, I can never remember….)

So I found some cylon miniatures on Thingiverse (they’re actually a *little bit* bigger than regular 32mm – if a 32mm character is, say, 6ft/2m these guys would be around 6’9″ or 2.2m or thereabouts – still “in scale”, just “quite tall”. I’m going to pretend that Cylons were supposed to be taller than humans).

Because I had three LEDs plus a common ground (or power, I forget which) I needed not two, but four wires running through the body of the miniature. I discovered that my usual-sized cylinder was just that little bit too narrow to fit so many wires down, so had to drill the minis out with a 1mm bit)

I whacked some 36AWS-gauge, enamelled magnet/transformer wire through the hole (enamelled means it doesn’t have the plastic coating, making it that little bit slimmer to fit through) and soldered on some LEDs

I think I’ve gone about as small as I can go. There are only three LEDs for my “larson scanner” – ideally I’d have liked four or more – so the effect will be less of a “swoosh” from side to side and more a “left-middle-right-middle- ” type animation. But who knows…. it might still look cool, right?

I’m still marvelling at getting 3 LEDs inside a 3mm wide gap…..

Now to program a PIC microcontroller and get this thing flashing! (sorry, Arduino fans, the AVR atmega328 is physically too big, and too over-powered for a simple LED flicker routine, so I’ll probably just “dead bug” a 12-pin PIC or something onto the underside of the base). I’ll need to see the extremities of the animation to be able to glue the LEDs into the correct place inside the helmet (if it’s a little bit off, the animation won’t go full side-to-side, which would be a shame at this late stage!)

@sundancer – we’ll soon know whether your idea for an animated cylon was genius or bonkers…..