The Olympus Project: Part 33 “More Electronics Installation”

Installing the LED Status Lamp

The last component to install is the LED status lamp. Fortunately, all of the pins used for the lamp are on the same side of the Nano board and pretty close together. Unfortunately the lamp is located on the side between the two plastic mounting rails for the Nano and the microSD card. This does not leave much working room.

I knew early on that we wouldn’t be using any extra wire for these connections. Except for the wire that connects to the common ground, this is true. The first thing we did was solder the 220Ω resistors to each of the red, blue and green pins on the LED. I cut the pins on the LED short, as I knew there was a limited amount of space to work with. I also want the wires from the resistors to fold back to reach the connections on the Nano. The picture on the right shows this part of the assembly. The resistors are soldered in place and the wires are bent into the approximate position on the Nano. The ground wire has not been soldered into place at this point.

When the Nano board is inserted into the avionics bay, the board comes all the way to the forward bulkhead. I knew that the lip around the LED lamp would end at the bulkhead as well. Line up the LED lip with the end of the Nano board and then routed the resistor wires to the appropriate connections on the Nano. However, at this stage I was not ready to solder these wires in place. I needed to make sure the assembly would fit inside the avionics bay.

Carefully insert the Nano and LED assembly into the avionics bay. With both pieces in their proper position, the resistor wires were bent over to hold them in place. Both pieces were carefully removed and the wires soldered in place.

In the picture on the right you can see the other connections are already in place. With the clamps holding everything in place we can solder the status lamp to the Nano and then trim off the excess wire.

Before you move on to the final assembly, check your system to make sure everything is working as expected. It is important to test your components and assemblies as you go along. It makes it much easier to detect and troubleshoot issues when they occur.