New HeatSink

This Project Actually Completed January 2009

This is a revision of the aluminum heat sink we have been using for the the 3 watt tricolor LED control boards.  These will serve as generic tricolor led drop in modules for future art pieces.   The control board has 3 FET control channels 1 for each color and a microcontroller, for the brains.  On the top sits the LED nestled in its heat sink to keep it cool.  The whole assembly in its present incarnation looks like this.

The first time I tried this it was in July of last year.  You can read about it here. That CAD file was produced with CamBam, very simply cutting the inside hexagon pocket and the outer rectangle.  This time, I wanted to add more surface area and ridge detail.  I wanted to round off any sharp edges and produce a more finished piece straight off the machine.  This job was ran as 3 seperate parts:

  • Roughing 01 uses a 1/8″ flat 2 flute endmill
  • Finishing 02 uses a 1/8″ 4 flute ballnose
  • profile 03 uses a 1/8″ flat 2 flute endmill to finally cut out the part

The roughing is a horizontal roughing and the finishing is a parallel.   I achieved all of this with Rhino and RhinoCam.  While the end piece came out quite nice, it does have some issues.  First the bottom of heatsink area is roughened by the ball nose.  Ideally this area would be perfectly smooth, I’ll have to figure out how to isolate this area next time.  The raised edge around the led does not really increase surface area all that much, which was the orginal goal.  Finally it took about 45 min to cut it this out, ouch.  So, while the practicality went way down, it does look really sweet!!!  Surely there is a compromise.

What follows below are some photos of the finished sink, and some of it installed in one of our light sconces.  The light sconces are collaboration with my artist friend Bridget Fox.  These have capacitive touch sensors, so you can turn them on through the clay, just by waving a hand over them, and they throw the colored patterning of dots up on the wall.  In the future I will try and do a post about the control electronics for the leds, but for now, I am just trying to get caught up.

Here it is in one of the our creations, this one is called Echinodermata, we are calling ourselves Ceramadelics.  These shots are from a show we were in called Merge Visual

The files:

Job 1 roughing01

Job 2 finishing02

Job 3 profile03

Read this before you make it…readme

This is the Rhino File heatsink1

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