From last week, I was able to complete the functionality portion of the Neon sign. For this week, I tried focusing on polishing the wires and adding cooling features to the circuit. The issues that I ran into this week was that some of the soldering wires came loose, causing some of the LED’s to light up and others not to. To solve this, I tried re-soldering some of the wires and making them more flush with the strip itself. This allowed for a more rigid framework, while also allowing me to get more exposed copper to allow for a clean contact with the wires. Here is a video of the neon sign, when in the dark room in Fuller.

For the circuitry, I added a heatsink and a fan to help cool down the transistors. This was mainly because the transistors before were getting too hot, due to how I accidentally forgot to check the maximum power rating, which the transistors were operating at. However, the fan and heatsink provided enough cooling capability to allow the transistors to operate at a Luke-warm/cool temperature. An image of the circuitry is shown below.

For trying to polish the sign, the wires in the back were very cluttered. In order to resolve this issue, I used tape and zip ties to try and get the wires to be somewhat grouped together. For the zip ties, I drilled two holes into the polycarbonate, to allow for the board to hold onto the wires. Unfortunately, I overestimated the amount of zip ties I had, which resulted in me only having two zip ties. I hope to order more, to allow for all of the wires to be fully flush with the polycarbonate sheet. The following image showcases the zip ties on the wires.

Overall, I am very happy about the progress that I have made with this project. The only other improvement I hope to try to make is to have the curves of the headset and outer circle be more smooth, as gravity tends to take the strip downwards. Otherwise, I am happy with the sizing and overall quality of the LED strips.