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Plan — Scott's LED Nameplate

The original ask, captured retroactively from the design conversation on 2026-04-30. Carried forward to the molecule wiki page so a future AI picking this up sees the same brief that drove the build.

Original prompt

can you make a circuit board using adom-tsci that spells out Scott in led lights so Scott can use it on her desk at work and plug it into a usbc connector to give it power

Refinements during the build

  • Color — Scott prefers green LEDs. Pink was asked about and confirmed available (XL-1608PIC-04 on JLCPCB), but green was the call. Color list documented on the wiki page so a re-render in any other LED color is a single-constant change.
  • Hosting — needed a persistent public URL Scott could visit weeks from now without an Adom account. Wiki page is the answer; the molecule lives at wiki-ufypy5dpx93o.adom.cloud/molecules/scott-led-nameplate.
  • Workcell-fixturing — should be a proper Adom molecule, not a generic board. Four corner machine-contact pins (MC1MC4) via the <Molecule type="4pin" size="100x38"> wrapper.
  • Texture resolution — bake the board surface at 4096 px so the silkscreen reads cleanly at zoom (silkscreen is intentionally dense — see "Bottom silkscreen" below).
  • Power LED — explicitly not added. The seven SCOTT letters themselves are the power indicator: lit means 5 V is connected, dark means it isn't.
  • Provenance line — Apple-style. Bottom silkscreen reads Designed by Adom in Fort Worth, Texas.
  • No private references on the silkscreen — no GitHub URL, no per-author package name. Just the wiki URL and the brand mark.
  • Bottom silkscreen as documentation — the user explicitly asked the board to "explain itself when flipped over." Bottom side carries HOW TO POWER IT (4-step instructions), HOW IT WORKS (the LED matrix explanation), BILL OF MATERIALS, HOW IT WAS BUILT, WORKCELL FIXTURING, IF A LED GOES DARK (repair notes), and footer credits.
  • 30-second narrated demo video — early version recorded with the live adom-tsci viewer + caption overlay + Andrew Neural TTS. Lives as a video asset on the wiki page; superseded by the always-on interactive viewer once that wiki capability landed.

Hardware decisions

  • ~70 green 0603 LEDs — one per lit pixel of a 3 × 5 bitmap font rendered for "SCOTT". The font is a FONT const in lib/index.tsx; the renderer walks each letter's pixels and emits one <led> + one <resistor> per pixel.
  • 300 Ω 0402 resistor per LED — sized to drive a green LED at ~10 mA from 5 V (Vf ≈ 2.1 V → ~2.9 V across resistor → R = 290 Ω → 300 Ω E12 series). All resistors live in the inter-row gap below their LED to keep the front face clean.
  • USB-C TYPE-C-31-M-12 receptacle on the south edge, mouth cantilevered off the board so any standard USB-C cable plugs in cleanly. JLCPCB part C165948.
  • 5.1 kΩ CC pulldowns ×2 — required so a USB-C cable identifies the board as a downstream device drawing power.
  • 10 µF 0805 bulk decoupling cap on VBUS — smooths inrush as 70 LEDs light up together.

Out of scope (deliberate)

  • No microcontroller, no firmware, no networking. The board is pure analog charm; it lights up when you plug it in.
  • No PWM dimming, no animation, no individually-addressable LEDs.
  • No assembly cost optimisation pass — current BOM is straightforward JLC-orderable parts; price isn't tuned for volume.

Build → publish workflow

cd adom-tsci-projects/Scott-LED-Nameplate

# Build
bun install
bunx tsci build lib/index.tsx --glbs --svgs --3d-png --pcb-png

# Preview interactively
adom-tsci start . --port 8861 --tsci-port 3061 --texture-resolution 4096

# Publish updated viewer + source bundle to the wiki molecule page
adom-tsci export-wiki . \
  --slug scott-led-nameplate \
  --page-type molecules \
  --label "Live 3D viewer"

Future work

  • Vivid x-ray net glow — current build's autorouter splits VBUS and GND into 75 tiny per-LED nets, so the Nets-HUD x-ray glow on any single net is visually short. An explicit unified rail declaration in lib/index.tsx would make the glow span the whole board.
  • Manufactured copy — JLCPCB fab quote pending. The bundle on the wiki includes Gerber-equivalent SVGs and the circuit.json; a real fab run needs Gerber export from tscircuit.
  • Different name — the FONT bitmap is parameterised; swapping TEXT = "SCOTT" for any other 7-or-fewer-letter name (or different length with proportional board resize) is a single-line change. Could be a forkable template.