Software engineer spent 5 months recreating detailed MRT map on printed circuit board with LED lights
PHOTO: Screengrab/Instagram/cjx3711
PUBLISHED ONJuly 06, 2021 9:44 AMByAlexander Kyle Thirumaran
With a combined interest in train system maps and printed circuit boards (PCB), one Singaporean software engineer miles away from home built a neat trinket that got the internet in a tizzy.
On Monday (July 5), Chai Jia Xun posted two images on Reddit of a palm-sized PCB trinket prototype detailing Singapore's train network with working LED lights for each station – which includes the upcoming Thomson-East Coast MRT line.
His post was upvoted over 600 times with almost 50 comments, within 24 hours, leaving many Redditors curious and excited at how it was made.
In the comments, the 29-year-old wrote: "Originally I only built the front thing, but then everyone I showed it to asked me if it could light up, hence I designed the back thing as well."
Chai, who has been working in Silicon Valley for over three years, told AsiaOne that with free software and relatively cheap production costs, he "wanted to make as many new PCB things as possible".
"I learned how to do this mostly from YouTube. It's less of electronics and circuitry and more of art. The backlighting panel was harder, that one was also a lot of googling and figuring out how circuits work," the graduate from NUS School of Computing said.
"My degree was not that relevant to this PCB thing," he added, "I learned how to do this mostly from Youtube."
Back in March, he also posted a video on Instagram of the PCB in action, with the lights blinking, one network line at a time.
[embed]https://www.instagram.com/p/CL4XOsIlOgu/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link[/embed]
He has also started work on PCBs highlighting the San Francisco Bay area and Tokyo metro system maps.
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"I intend on figuring out how to add colours to the lines, and power it. Then tidy it up a bit and possibly try to sell it," he told AsiaOne.
However, he added that "these are all just immediate future plans. I don't really intend on making a business out of it because after that I'll probably move on to new projects".
Redditors were highly receptive to his creation with one commenting, "I want this...so badly".
