Over the weekend I was working with Graeme Nixon (Techspec) who is currently technicaly managing Ballet Lorent’s current tour of LaNuit, it was a good weekend working with some fun and creative people. The show opens tomorrow 1st Nov 2011 at Dance City and continues a small tour around Scotland, its well worth a look out to go and see.
Today was an early start, up at 06.00, wash get dressed check my stuff and hop in the car and drive to york for a couple of days work, well, thats how I had planned it in my head. Just after Birtley on the A1 my trusty Honda Civic suddenly slowed down to 40mph without me taking my foot of the accelerator and wouldn’t let me go any faster, SHIT!! Then I noticed the engine light had came on, i had just passed the turnoff to escape the A1 so i pulled onto the hard shoulder to see if stopping and starting the car would do anything. Low and behold it did, well for a little while anyway. I had managed to get off the hard shoulder, drive for around 30 seconds before my car did the same again. It was in “limp mode”! I had to get off the A1 so I kept going at 40, sometimes getting to 45 on steeper bits and got onto the road to Durham, as soon as I could I pulled over, went onto Google maps and typed in mechanic bla bla bla and it came up with AFmotorservices. With the help of my satnav, and a rather slow trundle along all of the quietest roads I could find I made it to the garage, Adam (which i later found he was called) said he had time to look at it and plugged my car into the diagnostic gimbal which said i had a stuck ERG valve, which i now know is the return valve for exhaust gasses into the engine etc and is linked into the turbo. Anyway, he said replacing it would be expensive but he had time to look over it take it off and clean it out. I took him up on his offer and had a walk into Durham as it was going to take a couple of hours and there was bugger all I could currently do.
After a 30minute walk into Durham, had a coffee and done some work on my laptop, checked if there were any Iphone4s in stock anywhere, (there weren’t) I got a call off Adam who told me cleaning the part and all the gunk which was in it has fixed my sticky valve! I walked back to the Garage which was quicker than any frigging busses which proved hard to find in that direction. Adam talked me through what he had done, I gave hime some money and was finally heading south again!
I arrived at the workshop around 13.00 to a few sarcastic comments like “morning! oh no its afternoon, etc”, it wouldn’t be the same there without the dry humour! I got my shit together, checked out what had been happening over the weekend, James had been busy building up a few more IOM2 modules (I really haven’t made that up!), so I continued finishing the rest in anticipation that all of them are going to get used on this current project so best to build a good stock now. My other task running in paralel with this was to put together a prototype LED core which is to form the core light source of some of the scenic elements of a show about a big monkey. It wasn’t till late on friday when I got the full details and had a chat with Frieder Weiss who the sample is getting sent to. Now I’ve been aware of Frieder’s work for a while now so was really quite chuffed to have a chat with him, check out his work, especially MortalEngine with the beautiful use of “the absence of light”! Bedises that i had to come up with a high brightness RGBW (Red Green Blue White) centralised light source to fit within these hanging scenic elements, including cooling and a way of mounting them so we had 360 spherical light. With pretty much no time, I got a brief parts list together, checked what we could use in the workshop and got them ordered for a monday delivery.
So now, its monday evening, and after amy hours in the workshop, butchering an RGB source and a W source (we couldn’t get any RGBW in-time). Mounting them with some rather good thermal adhesive, soldering onto LED stuck to heat-sink (which is hard) we have a prototype. Its not pretty, well its kind of industrial pretty, but it does the job perfectly. I came up with the idea of the central hub to be a Dodecahedron which the workshop produced really well in a minimal timeframe, which gives us 12 faces (2 strings of 6 LED) although we only have 1 string (half) mounted here you get the idea!
NUMBERS-MAX dimmer voltage-Current Draw, bla bla bla…….
RED – 16.8v 350ma (Add in 22ohm 5watt resistor)
GREEN – 24v 350ma
BLUE – 24v 350ma
WHITE – 24v 350ma
To be driven off a 24v LED PWM dimmer
Here are a couple of sneak peeks, I only have my Iphone for pictures so trying to get a shot in the dark with the led on was impossible! You can see where i had to butcher 2 types of LED star to make a frankenstein RGBW, MK2 will be much much neater using the CREE RGBW and hopefully a little more warning!
RGBW DEATHSTAR, its bloody bright!
All tailed back to a dinky 9pin D-sub
That was a satisfying productive day, Ill turn up tomorrow, no-one will know the hours and effort put in to make this happen in time, and the next challenge will begin, oh its a glamorous life ;-), time for Bed!