Break Stuff!

Okay, we're almost ready to start soldering the LED's together. We bought perfboard to line the rails, but we had to cut it. We tried to use an exacto-knife to cut it first, but that was unsuccessful. Then we thought that we could cut it with a table saw or jigsaw or handsaw, but any that we tried just shattered the perfboard. (Seen in the picture)














So, we just broke it! We clamped down the perfboard under a metal bar and bent it up evenly with another metal bar so that it would snap at the spot that we wanted.

Now we have enough to go around our plexiglass!

Let there be light!

So we figured out what we want to do for our circuit -- we decided to use an 18V power source versus our old 30V source to make our circuit simpler and so that our potentiometers wouldn't have to take so much wattage. Thus, we have our source connected to 10 lines consisting of: a 100Ohm resistor, our 1kOhm potentiometer, and 10 IR LEDs in series.

And... guess what! It works!
















10 IR LEDs in series powered with an 18V source

Next step is to wire and solder the 10 lines of LEDs and place them in the rails

More Progress

We haven't posted here for a while, so I suppose it's time for a status update. We're still having a lot of trouble trying to figure out the circuit. We did set up the railings though!

We goofed at first a little.

Eventually we got them all done just fine.

We took some really cool photos of the screen with an LED hooked up while we touched the other side, but now the video won't load. I'll probably need to convert the video from the Logitech program we used, but it'll be up shortly!