Project 3 update

Okay so to be perfectly honest this project isn't really going to plan, we only have a couple of days left and still have heaps to do and Ive become a little disheartened at our groups lack of team work.

For the past week or so Ive been working on hooking up the external switches for the lasers, what I thought would be a quite simple task has turned out to be incredibly fiddly and frustrating, as the lasers are very temperamental and i burned out 6 of them in the process. The hacking apart and replacing the push button switch, with and external sliding switch was relatively straight forward, I just had to be careful with my soldering as to not overheat the laser too much and damage the diode. Originally I wanted to do away with the 3 1.5V watch battery's they individually running off and use a single 9V battery and power them in 2 sets of 3, wired up in series. I couldn't get this to work and the lasers immediately burned out.

So in the end I just stuck with using the watch battery's they came with, and I ended up having to basically rebuild the entire laser after the new switch was attached, using a combination of Card, Insulation tape and Hot glue. Its not the prettiest solution, but with the lasers being positioned on the inside of the panels and not really visible its no big deal I guess. I will post some video documentation of this when I get a chance.

Ive currently soldered the new switches onto all 6 lasers and tested them all, and I'm just working finishing the card casings for them. Will look in to wiring up the fan tomorrow, but compared to this, that should be pretty straight forward.

From looking at Hongs Blog, It appears as though he has finally managed to get the laser cutting done correctly, better late than never I suppose. Hopefully we can meet up on Monday/Tuesday and assemble it. Not really too sure what Jenni has been up to.