Failure, Recalibration & Iteration

Scaling up my design from the original mock up proved to be one of the most difficult things in this project. Problem number 1 was that the cotton balls were not good at defusing points of light from a single LED. My initial mock up was lit by a string of low output LEDs I had lying around. As a result I didn’t take into account the fact that my scaled up actual project would by using high powered LEDs but only one per silhouette. The cotton balls simply obscured too much light. I would need to wait until the weekend to find a new material, so in the meantime I started soldering connection onto my fade candy board and played with different colored lighting in the mock up I had.

I would by lying if I said I soldered the connection well. Crunched for time I was far sloppier than I should have been, and it ended up costing me the function of one of my LED strips, luckily the shorter one. Fortunately I still had to strips of 64 to work with so I opted to just write off the last strip of 20.

Needing a new material to diffuse the light and also hide the inner workings of my project, I went to wallmart where I found polyester quilt batting, a kind of synthetic fiber material used to fill quilts. It looked like it would suit my needs perfectly.

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