Mill Angled Joints for Adafruit’s NeoPixel LED Strips

 
 

Adafruit made it easy to add intelligent LEDs to your projects with their NeoPixel LED strips, which integrate LEDs alongside a driver chip into a tiny surface-mount package controlled through a single wire. NeoPixels use a single Arduino pin, are cross-compatible, and can be used individually or chained into longer strings. And now, thanks to a project by CrashSpace co-founders Tod E. Kurt (@todbot) and Carlyn Maw (@carlynorama), NeoPixel strips can take even more shapes and sizes using NeoJoints, angled solder connectors you can quickly mill on your Bantam Tools Desktop PCB Milling Machine. 

 
 

NeoJoints are part of Tod and Carlyn's Mill-a-Week project, where they experiment with what they can make on our mill. To date, they've shared EAGLE files for eight different NeoJoint angles to date, with more in the works:

  • 90° right angle

  • 0° straight joint

  • 60° joint (good for making triangles)

  • 120° joint (good for making hexagons; pictured below)

  • 82.43° angle (for inner angle of 7-segment-style display)

  • 97.57° angle (for outer angle of 7-segment-style display)

  • 180° angle (for putting serpentining strips; second image below)

  • 80° angle (for putting serpentining strips)

 
 

NeoJoints have the following features:

  • Solderable holes for adding additional power at joints

  • Cuttable trace on data line for separating strips logically

  • Mounting hole for 2-56 screw

  • Single-sided millable, with a single 1/32" endmill (though adding 1/8" to cleanup helps)

 
 

Their documentation even includes best practices for soldering. 

 
 

Neat! Thanks, Tod and Carlyn! We're excited to mill and use these. Check out their full documentation on Hackaday.io and GitHub.