Week 9

This week all the parts needed to come together and be glued, sealed and soldered to form the complete unit. All of that was hindered but what I assume to be a faulty LED strip.

The lights have been described as individually addressable, I’ve learned that in a lot of cases to be able to do that you would need to buy a separate controller chip but I was lucky enough that it came packaged with the strip.

By running different examples that came with APA102 and Adafruit libraries and examples in their gitHub repositories I’ve learned that sending bytemessages to their clock and data pin had no effect what so ever.

I understand that it is not easy for the micro controller to interpret how to divide the bits and this could generate random behavior, so I tried to control them manually through a power supply unit, the results were not deterministic which further confirmed our suspicions. I then consulted with several technicians and PhD student to discover that the lights were in-fact faulty.

The casing however was ready to be used and printed out quite nicely, some issues I encountered with the process were how sensitive the printer were to any sort of minute change in pressure and temperature, as well as I did not fully understand how the printers formed hollow object such as housing so it took me several takes, eventually we opted to print parts of it that would be assembled after and drill holes where insertions needed to be made for inputs and outputs.

Despite the faulty lights we went ahead with assembling the unit and presentation, so we could showcase the effect and get feedback.