The toughest part of this project is sheer repetition: each panel carries twenty LED modules, and every single component has to be checked for orientation before anything moves forward. DJ Legion handles it with a steady stencil-and-tweezers workflow instead of paying for assembly, since the quoted assembly price came out higher than doing it by hand.
The build sequence is tidy. A panel from PCBWAY gets taped down to a green cutting mat, then Mechanic solder paste is spread through a metal stencil using a wooden spatula and a plastic card as the squeegee. Fine tweezers place the tiny 100-ohm resistors and the small white Osram SMD LEDs. The populated board then moves to a textured heat-resistant mat for a pass with a handheld hot air wand, and a soldering iron with solder wire covers any touch-ups afterwards.
Details that stand out: the panel is bordered with spacer boards, each board holds twenty modules separated by a V-groove, and the maker even used a small CNC mill to drill their own plate. Fault-finding is handled with a digital multimeter probing individual circuit paths and LEDs, with failed parts marked in black marker and swapped out under hot air.
It is not done yet, though. The individual strips still need to be snapped along the V-grooves, wired and tested one by one. Early results look promising: test leads soldered to the edge terminals connect the completed panel to a Farnell L30C benchtop supply, and each row of white LEDs lights up. The maker calls the work long and boring, which seems a fair description for manual placement at this scale.
Project by DJ Legion. Watch it on their YouTube channel: