Pin Forming LED Leads to match PIC Pinout
Introduction
The other day I bought a bag of one thousand green LEDs from Electronic Goldmine. The bag was sitting on my desk and every once in a while I would grab some of the LEDs and wonder what to do with them. I was arranging them in a perf board (one of those little ones from Radio Shack), when I thought it would be nice to arrange them in a diamond. This would highlight what I thought was the most interesting aspect of these LEDs, the view looking at the corner. The problem, for me, was that I did not feel adding a wire to each LED so I could plug each LED into a breadboard.
Diamond Arrangement
The arrangement of LEDs looked like this.
Pin Forming
I realized that the arrangment of LEDs was not very large at all. Each LED was 5mm x 5mm. In the diamond arrangement, the full size was 35mm x 35mm, or about 1 1/2 in x 1 1/2 in. This is bigger than a IC, but not by that much. So I had an idea to simply bend the pins into an arrangement that matched the port (output) pins on the PIC. I knew that I would solder all of the cathode leads together, so I only needed to worry about the anode leads. Because the pins were going to go around the 0.300in spacing of an IC, I had to space then at 0.5in. The Sharpie marks on the bottom of the board represent where I had to line up each pin (although some of the marks are wrong).
Placement
The LEDs and perf board placed over the PIC on a breadboard.
Fully Inserted
The LEDs with pins fully inserted into breadboard.
