Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Head towards the light
Tada! This video shows the PIC LED Flasher at work. This is just a prototype though. I'll soon have pictures of the final version.....as soon as I can buy more wire. Imagine this prototype in a small box. There will be holes drilled above each LED and in these holes the fiber optics will be put. Then the fiber optics will be arranged in a pattern one of the other R2 Builders made and is used by most other builders. The circuit controlling the LEDs is the PIC LED Flasher I've shown in the past (check out the very early postings (note that I haven't copied those postings to this blog from Yahoo 360 yet. Click here to see them there)). It's polarity is backwards from what you'd expect. The green wire is the positive and the red wires are the negative. LEDs are polarity sensitive so they must be connected correctly. If you look at one from the top, you'll see that one side has a flat edge while the rest is round, like a dome. The flat side is the negative.
More coming soon.
John
Friday, June 13, 2008
Finaly....something worth posting
First, a real quick update on my lightsaber.
Here it is freshly painted. The black part is what was painted; the blue part is painter's tape to protect the chrome.
Now to what we're all here for. I have recently thought up a brilliant idea on how to design my droid's Logic Displays. Traditionally, most builders use 1 LED for each point of light in the displays. However, this requires 24v of battery power. The batteries typically used for our droids are big and heavy. The more voltage, the bigger and heavier the battery. For this reason, I've been trying to keep my power requirements down to only 12v, but the logic displays have until now been a problem. The front display has 90 points of light or 32 blue, 54 white, and 4 aqua. Using a QK169 PIC Flasher Kit (an assembling required LED blinking circuit), 8 strings of these lights are assembled in patterns so the blinking looks somewhat random. Now here is where my idea differs: instead of using 1 LED per point of light, use 1 LED of each color for each string of lights using fiber optic strands to multiply one LED into however many is needed of that color for that string. Check out this drawing I made for an example of what I'm rambling about:
I apologize if I left you feeling a little dizzy from this explanation. So to simplify, I'll be making more drawings demonstrating this new concept of mine and, hopefully soon, I'll have prototypes to make videos of.
John
Here it is freshly painted. The black part is what was painted; the blue part is painter's tape to protect the chrome.
Now to what we're all here for. I have recently thought up a brilliant idea on how to design my droid's Logic Displays. Traditionally, most builders use 1 LED for each point of light in the displays. However, this requires 24v of battery power. The batteries typically used for our droids are big and heavy. The more voltage, the bigger and heavier the battery. For this reason, I've been trying to keep my power requirements down to only 12v, but the logic displays have until now been a problem. The front display has 90 points of light or 32 blue, 54 white, and 4 aqua. Using a QK169 PIC Flasher Kit (an assembling required LED blinking circuit), 8 strings of these lights are assembled in patterns so the blinking looks somewhat random. Now here is where my idea differs: instead of using 1 LED per point of light, use 1 LED of each color for each string of lights using fiber optic strands to multiply one LED into however many is needed of that color for that string. Check out this drawing I made for an example of what I'm rambling about:
I apologize if I left you feeling a little dizzy from this explanation. So to simplify, I'll be making more drawings demonstrating this new concept of mine and, hopefully soon, I'll have prototypes to make videos of.John
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