Light up, light up

The LEDs arrived.

I started putting them in the cranes, through the bottom, and realised that at the rate it was taking me I wouldn't make Light Night 2012, let alone the Light Night in a few weeks. I was having to virtually completely unfold the crane, put the light in, then refold it.

This was the first real problem I've had since the start of the project, and at this late stage it panicked me that something so massive could go wrong. I'm also a little bit fixated with planning, so to have not factored in that my plan wouldn't work made me really angry with myself, and made me panic more.

Hours later, with a prototype crane so mangled it looked like the victim of a road traffic accident, and me sat sobbing on the sofa because I still couldn't figure out a quick way to put the LED in, and the way I was doing it was so complicated I couldn't possibly ask anyone else to help, and my lovely, gorgeous husband looked at it and said

"why don't you just cut a hole in the top, and drop the LED in?"

The man's a genius. It now takes around 30 seconds to do a crane, and once they're hung up, you won't even notice the hole in the top (it's covered over with sticky tape so the LED doesn't just pop out again).

I'm back on track!

Crane 2.0

Now I had the paper, LED and the (3v) battery, I could make a proper prototype, one that I could test for longevity, for useability...and mainly for problems.

I folded a crane from the printer paper, slid in the LED, and pushed the sticks through the top. This presented the first problem - the top of the crane is the weakest point, and I'm basically pushing holes in it. So I need to work on that.

Then I added the battery to the LED, and wrapped it up in insulation tape. This presented the second problem - the insulation tape is too sticky, and the adhesive was getting between the contact on the LED (the stick! I found out the proper name!) and the battery, which was making the light flicker. Annoying enough for one crane, but can you imagine a whole roomful, all flickering intermittently? So I swapped the insulation tape for sellotape, which worked much better, but was still a little flickery, so that's something else I need to work on.

However, if you ignore these problems, I have my new, all improved, prototype!



Overall though, the idea is pretty sound. It seems feasible and feedback so far has been pretty good. I'd like loads more feedback though, so I'm going to put the idea out there a bit more, and if you want to let people know about the blog, and leave comments, I'd be ever so grateful!

Light at the end of the tunnel

The realisation of how much it was going to cost to buy materials had got me down, and I was fed up of reading around trying to work out a way to understand circuitry to get the costs down. I was trying to explain it all to my husband, and he just wasn't "getting" what I was trying to do, so I went to the LED throwie site to show him an example.

LED throwies don't use 1.5v batteries. They use 3v batteries, meaning you'd only need one to make the LED light up.

I did know this, but I think I'd discounted it because I couldn't find anywhere in town that sold cheap 3v batteries, whereas I'd managed to pick up a humungous stash of 1.5v ones at Ye Olde Pounde Shoppe. I quickly went onto a few wholesale type battery websites and realised that just because they were around £3-£4 in the shops, didn't mean I couldn't get them cheap. In fact, I could get them cheaper than the AG12s I'd been pricing up, and I'd be using half as many!

So off I went to my local battery shop (it isn't really a high street battery shop, that would be odd. it sells other things as well. like pens.) ready to shell out the £4 I knew the 3v battery would cost. After all, it was for a prototype. You have to have prototypes, right? There were a few to choose from, and I picked one up, and walked to the counter, and the woman in front of me was asking loads of questions about different styles of attendance registers (the shop sells those too). I waited, and the shopkeeper went and got some catalogues, and they discussed colours. I waited, and she tried to explain what her register was currently like, because she hadn't thought to bring it in with her.

I'm not the most patient person in the world, and I was getting annoyed that the shopkeeper didn't think to say "I'll just leave you with the catalogue while I serve my next customer", so when she said she didn't know what she wanted, but had a vague idea, I nearly shouted at her. Then I thought, actually, maybe I should check which of these batteries they use for LED throwies, so I know I'm getting the most suitable one, which was pretty much the same as not bringing your register. So I popped the battery back on the shelf, and left. Then I thought I'd nip next door to Another Ye Olde Pounde Shoppe, to pick up supplies for a birthday party, and lo and behold I found a pack of 8 3v batteries for £2. Well, £1.99 actually (it wasn't actually a pound shop, it's just cheap).

Digging around in my bag whilst waiting for my bus home, I pulled out an LED (I always have LEDs and batteries in my pocket or bag nowadays. I'd be handy in a powercut) and checked the throwie website for the right battery (which luckily came in the pack, because I didn't actually check that), and I popped the two together, and...let there be light! It worked!

So now I'm back on track! It all seems feasible again!

Tomorrow is the initial planning meeting for Light Night, which is where I'll find out a lot more (hopefully) about how Light Night works and what I need to be considering in my planning. Then I can put together my proposal...

Positives and negatives

I've spent most of my time since the last post testing out batteries. Big ones, little ones, watch batteries and torch batteries; attempting to figure out circuits and safety systems, and how voltage and ampage works. I still can't get my head around creating "strings" of cranes, but I've discovered something: batteries last longer than you'd think.

I've been using rudimentary circuitry - I've taped the sticks of the LED (still not found out what the correct term for those are) to the batteries. The plus side of this is that it is easy, you can put a tab in (so you can make them up prior to needing them and only activate them when you pull the tab), and there's little danger of electrocuting myself, anyone else, or setting fire to the whole shebang.

I started a test using AG12 batteries (which are coin batteries, but still relatively small) on Monday, and as of Wednesday night, it is still going strong enough to light up the inside of my crane - in fact it is still as bright as it was when I first connected the batteries up:


The batteries are only 1.5v (roughly), whereas the LEDs are around 3v, so I need two batteries to each LED. Which means 2000 batteries in all. 2000 batteries. And who knew that batteries are so expensive?

I'm looking at two options now: figure out another way to do it, or figure out a way to get cheap batteries. Anyone reading this from Duracell?

You light up my life

So the light up crane was a go-ahead, but I needed better lights now I knew what the cranes would be made of.

I thought that someone had probably already done something similar, though I’d already googled variations on “light up cranes” to make sure I wasn’t copying someone else’s work, so I spent a while googling “make your own fairy lights”, “make your own LED art installation” etc. Turns out, the information superhighway is deficit in light up stuff with clear and easy instructions on how to Do It Yourself.

I googled LEDs, thinking that I was pretty au fait with them already, and it would be a doddle to figure it out, which led me on to realise that despite doing electronics at school, being responsible for the lighting rig at college, and making my own light-up tiara for my wedding, I haven’t the faintest idea how electricity works. Now I’ve spent hours reading up on it, I know less than before.

Since when did I let that stop me?

First task was to find the easiest thing that lights up that I could make. Google yielded an LED throwie. Okay, that looks pretty simple, and I don’t even need the magnet that it’s attached to, so basically I’m looking at taping an LED to a battery, and that’s it. Easy.

Off I went to the local cheap shop to buy:
- one of everything with an LED in it (I wasn’t sure which would be easiest to dismantle)
- a shed load of extra coin batteries (no idea what the difference is in batteries bar size, and don’t really understand the whole voltage thing, but I’m guessing it’s not going to be high enough to cause me any permanent harm) and
- lots and lots of insulation tape. I pretty much live by the “if in doubt, stick tape on it” mantra.

Here’s (part of) my haul:



The LED tealights seemed to be the flimsiest, so I started by trying to take one apart. I actually did this before I even got home, so there’s no pictures, but it was really simple – prise off the bottom and the electric bit falls out, then you can wiggle the LED until the bit soldered to the rest of the mechanism (probably not the right word, but the switch and battery pack and stuff) snaps off. Et voila! You have an empty casing, a load of now useless electric mahgumbo and an LED bulb. They even came with batteries included, so I popped those out to experiment with.

The batteries were teeny-tiny, and there were three of them, which when I finally managed to juggle them into line and put the LED sticks (what do you call the bits that come off the bulb?) onto them made the LED light up! Hurrah, I am a bona fide electronic genius!

Next was to stick a load of tape around this to keep it all together, and then I quickly folded up a crane out of the paper I’d decided to use, and then proceeded to gut it to slide the LED contraption into the middle of it. Finally, I had my very first LED prototype (I decided that the Christmas light one was a test, not a prototype, okay?) of my light up cranes:



The picture isn’t very good, mainly because I’m not a very good photographer. Plus, using a flickering candle LED meant that much like the Christmas light I used when testing out papers, the light was dimmer than I’ll want it for the proper installation, flickery (great for simulating candles, rubbish for cranes) and yellow, whereas I’m planning on using superbright white LEDs. I used the night-vision setting on my camera to show the crane up a bit more:



So, it’s possible. There’s still a million things to sort out, like how do you wire up 1000 LEDs and put them inside the cranes, and string it all up before the LED starts to run out? But, it’s looking properly possible now, and I’m getting rather excited!