The week began with Damien and I spending countless hours custom cutting gears and welding them into place. The process was excrutiatingly slow but the results were well worth with. SIMON(our smartsurface) now had a fixed mechanical structure that provided rigidity to the hinged planes, it could now stand up without flopping over like a dead fish. Damien also learned how to use the mig welder.
Damien's Practice welds
Negotiating with SIMON
Perfection!
Rachel and Z were pretty excited when we brought SIMON to Design Lab 1 in the early morning hours. Afterwords, we went to McDonalds to get breakfast and celebrate- Did you know they start serving breakfast at 3 am? Us neither-
The Next major roadblock came with the Peggy LED board. Whole days were arranged around working to assemble this board, the LED's and ethernet cable required over 4000 solder connection! The first attempts at testing Peggy were pretty disappointing to say the least; only a quater of the LEDS turned on. Multiple hours were then spent on testing all of the solder connections to the board and Z noticed that the IC chips were in backwards! As a group, we decided that enough time and energy had already been invested into the peggy board to warrant overnighting new chips to ressurect our lighting system. The Chips arrived early thursday and we were dealt yet another blow; only half the LED's were now working, and only just. The LED's flickered and fizzled, there had to be a short somewhere-
With hours to go, our options were becoming slim. Luckily Z had picked up some adhesive backed copper foil I mentioned to him earlier. With only a piece of acrylic and come copper foil, we (Damien, Rachel, Z, and myself) decided to scrap Peggy and build a new circuit. The result shown below was to laydown strips of copper on the acrylic for a makeshift circuit. The circuit used 4 TIP-120 transistors to control the circuits ground connections at 4 points, one for every color of LED we were using. The transistors allowed us to use the PWM signal from the Arduino to perform color mixing, and effectively replace the Peggy board. The whole process was fairly quick, with Damien stripping the ethernet from the Peggy board, Rachel then testing each salvaged pixel, then handing it back to Damien for positioning while I soldered the wires in place.
R.I.P. former Peggy Board
Creating our alternative board, I think we dubbed it "Margaret"
Completed Circuit with the few LED connections: TESTED AND FUNCTIONING
Here's to hoping Margaret wouldnt be a treacherous black-hole of time and energy like her predecessor-
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