All lit up!

In my last post about the lantern I was working on getting enough voltage to all my lights by running parallel power lines. After having a failed attempt at this using only thin ribbon wire for extra power lines (not ground), Jiffer recommended using thicker speaker wire and running parallel power and ground lines. This was the key! You can see the progression from last week's dimming issue (white turns to yellow), to this week's full white lights!

It took 14 parallel power lines to achieve this wonderful white light. This was a mess to say the least! So to make this a bit more organized I soldered the power lines to a perfboard, leaving only the signal lines (and one ground) to be connected directly to the Arduino Uno and getting rid of the mess of alligator clips.

Since the lights were up and running I could start testing out the paper on different areas of the lights (such as the bumps on the tree extremities) to make sure it was bright enough and to try out some paint and wax combinations. I still deciding between black and white paint/wax or adding in color, especially when planning to use the full RGB spectrum of lights.

And of course after some test runs I finally started papering the lantern! Here is the progression from today! Hopefully next time I will be able to get a time lapse of the papering process.