After I left of the last post where I had went for a run around Taunton we had one day left in Karls studio doing some LED development trying out some different optics. We discovered that if we introduced a smoke machine, and put an optic from an LED Lenser P7 over a 120 degree 4 color led you got quite a nice effect. Not the result we were looking for but pretty all the same.
The following Monday I was back in the hangar working on more led design as the brief had changed and the goalposts moved a little, which, to be honest, is for the better. This did mean back to the drawing board with the physical design and new challenges.
Boo, Jims dog was back in the hangar after a holiday and was looking healthier after his diet. This did mean that every time you were eating something or even just ventured into the kitchen you got this…..
After a quick turnaround design process and some lovely CNC machining of a combined heat sink and case we had a foundation for the printed circuit board, before sending off the PCB for manufacture I printed off the circuit to scale just to make sure it would fit.
On the weekend I was back in Newcastle, and even though the angel of the north has been there since 1998 I have never actually went and visited it. So on the Saturday morning after I had been for a I drive to the site of the angel. Apart from a few picnic tables and some playing fields and of course the sculpture there is not allot there. It is though when you get up close a very impressive structure and generally just a nice place to hang out of you just want to read a book have a picnic or just sit in the sun.
On Sunday I drove down to Birmingham to do a gig for the DRP group in the Hilton Metropole. It had been years since id been to this venue and when I got there nothing had changed. I didn’t know a whole lot about the gig before I got there apart from there were pair of Panasonic projectors, which needed blending into a single image. We started at 06.00 on the Monday rigging 6 projectors and all the relevant cabling. After some creative projector manipulation we had a basic projection blend setup by the evening. We were projection on to a set, which the content was mapped to, the tricky bit was that all we had was a single HD feed from power-point. Normally you would use some software to output 2 feeds with an overlap to do the blend. On this, from Brads suggestion we used the zoom and HV shift on the projectors themselves to select the part of the image we wanted and then did the blend on the projectors, it actually worked a treat.
I was looking after video playback on the conference, I haven’t worked a conference for probably 2 years and had forgotten how long some of the speeches can go on for. During this time there is nothing to do apart from wait for your next cue. Its at this point I started doodling, we were doing the conference for the SPAR brand, so I did a Spar doodle!
On the Wednesday morning I was driving back north to Stage one where work continued on the custom LED. I had built up some prototype units and was trying to get as much brightness out them as possible before they either overheated or drew more current than the circuit could handle. They are now BRIGHT and so far, after 36hour full whack testing the firmware is bulletproof! More testing to follow!
I had to recycle some old broken electronics which I found in the workshop to make a power data breakout unit, its amazing what you can do with a Dremmel, some wires and a bit soldering to make life easy!
That’s a condensed month from my last blog post, its been a fast month too, in-fact its been a fast year! Here’s a face from the Days Inn Weatherby! I can’t believe I haven’t seen this before!
