Things are looking up! The fab house had no problem making the donut shaped PCB and I’ve just received the first batch.

And what’s more, they actually fit in the saucer!

The next job is to build one up and make sure it still fits with all the components added – that’s still a gamble. I’ve gone for surface mount resistors to save space, but after checking and checking, the one thing I didn’t notice until just after I sent the design off is that I’ve used the smaller 0805 package rather than the intended 1206 package which means they will be even more fiddly to hand solder.

Back in 2010 I added some custom lighting to the Pegasus Alpha Centauri UFO using one of my LED driver modules. There is very little space inside the UFO body, so the controller had to be housed externally and there was only just enough room to wire up all the LEDs as you can see here (not the neatest wiring in the world!) 

 At the time I was thinking about producing a PCB to hold all the components and turn it into a neat drop in unit, but never took it further. A recent conversation with an interested party has brought this off the back burner again and after spending a couple of hours messing around with layouts I’ve come up with the following (paper) prototype.

 I was originally planning on using surface mount LEDs but there was an issue with the way the ‘portholes’ in the bottom of the saucer are at an angle which meant the light would not be even. After some head scratching I came up with a possible workaround using standard through hole LEDs that should solve this.

The next possible showstopper is whether I can get the boards made up at a viable price. Many of the ‘cheap’ low volume prototype fab-houses have a lot of restrictions on what you can get away with, and a round board with a big hole in the middle may be pushing things too far. We shall see…