Blink Blink

It has been a busy, tiring, at times frustrating, but ultimately very productive day. To start with I have managed to get a lot of the components onto the front of the quilt. I am really pleased with how well the capacitors are standing up. My resistors are much easier to read than the real thing too :) I have to make an R14, when I planned the components I did it from the parts in the kit rather than the list of parts. The kit was missing one resistor, and although I have bought a real one to make up the kit I haven't got round to making the fabric one yet. Either way this is definitely recognizable as the board in the kit so I am happy.
This is the real thing. Not the clearest picture, but I am tired so it will do. You can probably see it has been adjusted slightly, this is because some of the component need to be spread around the quilt so have been put on spur boards.

Finally here is the wiring loom for the quilt. The four small square boards are the LED clusters. I have replaced each single LED on the original with four on the quilt. This should make them visible in the exhibition center. For some reason this very simple kit didn't want to play ball at all. As I have mentioned I felt I had a problem with the sensitivity of the microphone and I wasn't getting the brightness I wanted from the LED's. Bytepilot had been giving assistance but nothing was working. I simply wasn't getting the results we expected. Last night I admitted defeat, this wasn't going to work for me, I needed an man who knows and an oscilloscope. My DVM is great, but it isn't what you need for tracking audio around a circuit.

We have spent the afternoon poking, prodding and talking nonsense to this board, but still it wouldn't play. We tried a duplicate, no go. Now remember these kits are supposed (and in my experience are) idiot proof. We decided that one of the transistors had died, the same one on both boards, so replaced it, and yay it did work. So how had we killed the first one? Had it been making it light just one LED? Nope. Was it trying to make it light many? No. Who knows what was wrong with it? It works now though and I am thrilled. It is far better than I had hoped after my first few attempts, the LED's are bright and the microphone is sensitive, it was showing us an aircraft going over earlier. Thank you Bytepilot.

We have realized there may be another issue. It is sensitive enough to pick up noises when it is packed going to the show. The batteries probably won't last the two weeks it will be in transit. I won't be able to get to the quilt to changes it's batteries before judging. I am going to try calling the people running the show tomorrow and ask if, as part of the hanging process, they could switch my quilt on for me. I am not hopeful, given it is a rather odd request, and if they won't I have to find a way of it switching itself on when it is hung up. Could be interesting.