The “Err” sign I built with Peggy. (make yours today!)

EvilMadScientist sells a kit called “Peggy” that allows you to build all sorts of things… including a Mooninite-sign from the ATHF bomb-scare in Boston, if you’re crafty-enough.

Disclaimer: I highly recommend you have a good amount of soldering and electrical experience before attempting this, though. It wasn’t a difficult kit to build (although it’s very time-consuming and requires exceptional attention to detail in certain areas), but it’s also not something that would be easy to learn-on either.

I built this sign in about 4-hours on Friday night and gave it to my friend for his birthday afterward, but I’ll have to fix it later since 100 Blue-LEDs turned out to NOT be enough to finish “Err’s” arm… I had to use some of the leftover pink ones and that made the Volkswagen symbol in his hand look more like some sort of torch or whip… haha.

I will fix that later.

Anyway, the only other major complaint I had with the kit was that the photo-sensor that they include (at least right now) isn’t sensitive-enough for indoor use. I bought one of those 5-Packs of Photocell sensors for like $4 at Radioshack and just used one of those instead… much better. (video attached below)

UPDATE ON THIS: Apparently you can program the IC to handle different levels of light, or even they can do it for you before they ship the kit to you. So this is no longer an issue.

Some of Err’s features (like his eyebrows) aren’t on the grid of LEDs that Peggy offers, either… you have to be a bit creative on bending the leads for each LED and this becomes quite time-consuming. However, it’s still a lot of fun to build… and if you’re mad-skilled you can reprogram the IC (integrated-circuit) to control the lights more specifically (to make Err’s eyebrows blink… or something.) By default, all of the lights are on unless you have it set to turn-off with the lights or daytime are present.

“Peggy” isn’t just for building Mooninite signs, though! You can make whatever you want in whatever color you want, and even program it to flash, blink, etc. as I hinted-at above. I won’t be doing that, but I will definitely be working on some other designs for friends in the future. It’s a great gift and makes anyone’s home just a-bit-more cutting-edge.

Instructions, initial soldering:

After about 1 and a 1/2 hours I had all of the components and the first, test LED mounted and soldered:

Then… continued mounting and soldering the rest over the next 2 hours:

The finished project is shown below for scale. As you can see, there are some leftover Pink LEDs being used in the right-arm, I’m going to swap them out at a later date so that you can really see the “VW” clearly! (we are all Volkswagen enthusiasts, haha)

Pretty awesome kit. Check out their website for more stuff they make with electronic-components and simple circuits.