I spent a full day in my parents' basement workshop soldering Teeces' front logic displays and clipping, poking and prodding the LEDs for the rear logic display. All that's left now is the solder the rear display, all 120 LEDS (240 points ... ack).
Here is droid-building in all its elegance: Hunching over a workbench with heavy-duty nail clippers taking the flanges off the non-flangeless 3mm LEDs and then taking wire cutters and snipping the LEDs' leads short so they'll make for easier soldering on the boards. It works, even if it wouldn't pass an FDA inspection for use in medical devices.
My dad did some searching while I was at work and formed a theory that the LEDs I had purchased so cheaply from eBay might have started life in large lots meant for military or medical or other precision work that contained a single component that failed inspection. It'd be cheaper, he guessed, to throw out the whole batch rather than to test each LED. The tossed LEDs then might have been broken up into small batches for cheap sales. I don't know whether it's true, but it's at least plausible.
My father was a great help when things went wrong with the FLDs. One LED on a board stayed lit. Others flickered. He (a retired electrical engineer) talked about how he would have gone about troubleshooting such a problem. After some trials, I got the thing working. Score one for rational problem-solving!
No comments:
Post a Comment