customisable LED soldering jig

I liked the idea of withanHdammit of having a jig to solder LED stripes. Unfortunately, I needed a four pin version…
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updated February 22, 2024

Description

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When using LED stripes to illuminate a showcase, it is nice to mount them in a zig-zag fashion. The jig makes it easy to solder the ribbon cables connecting the stripes with one or two 90° angles and gives the wiring a clean look.

Since I expect a lot of people to need slightly different designs, I created a customizable model in OpenSCAD where you can change the number of pins as well as the width of the led stripe.

If you need the bend in the opposite direction, please mirror the STL in your slicer software.

Adjustable parameters:

  • number: the number of wires needed in the jig
  • width: the width of the LED strip; the width of the complete jig is 2mm wider;
  • length: the total length of the jig
  • wire width: the width of the channels for the wires
  • length_straight (new): additional parameter that allows to have an additional straight section after the bend
  • mirrored (new): set to 1 to generate a jig with the cables bending to the right instead of to the left (leave it at 0)
  • straight_only (new): set to 1 to generate a jig for soldering jobs with cables going into the straight direction; the length of the straight channels is then: width + length_straight + the width of the outer walls (2)

The outlets for the wires in the jig will be evenly distributed over the length of the LED strip. Be carefull: if the number of wires time the wire-width is larger than the width of the LED strip, the model will not work anymore.

Update: the extremely short channel holding the wire on the inside bend makes it difficult to solder. A straight section (parameter: length_straight) can be used to add a straight section after the bend for easier soldering.

Category: Electronics

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Model origin

The author remixed this model. Imported from Thingiverse.

10mm LED soldering jig
by withanHdammit (thingiverse.com)
 

Differences of the remix compared to the original

I copied the principle idea and completely redid the design in OpenSCAD. In my version, the key parameters are variables and can easily be used by the user to adapt the jig to his needs, e.g., the width of his LED stripe, the number of contacts, …. Also, I lowered the height of the jig's side to make the contacts easier to reach with a hot soldering iron.

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