I decided to cobble together one baton. A couple of things were immediately obvious:
- It’s
a bit ofa pain trying to solder *inside* of a square tube - Thin PCB warp too much
- Small pads coupled with thin traces tend to break or lift off of the PCB very easy
- Need to find a better way to interconnect the PCBs, both while daisy chaining, as well as sideways to its neighbor
Despite all of that, I did manage to attach the battery to the PCBs, and left it tethered to an external controller through a very long ribbon cable. I don’t have the design for the actual controller done yet, so I had to use an external one. This was actually advantageous. Especially since I realized that I could easily go up to a 1″ diameter tube and still be okay. I’ll have to rework the PCBs for the LEDs a bit, but that’s not a big issue, in fact it may be a bit cheaper in the long run. But, more importantly, it gives me an additional 3mm to work with for the controller. That may not seem like a lot, but 3mm translates to 118mils, which means I can place seven 8mils thick traces in that space. That is important!
Other things that became apparent after I started playing with it:
- Need to reverse the placement of the battery and controller – this may be the solution to having wires connected to the LEDs
- Need to make changes to the code and put the image delays in the control file, not the image file itself *
- Taking video capture just doesn’t work as well as watching the real thing
- Taking pictures however, works beautifully. 🙂
This is what the video looks like, when captured at 30 frames per second. It’s nowhere near as awesome as seeing it with your own eyes.
* Besides storing delays, there are other items on the list:
- Add proportion calculator for images of various widths
- Switch to a 24-bit BMP format instead of the arbitrary RGB storage engine used now
- Add the ability to have a (longer) delay between images