Decision making.
During manufacturing I came to the realisation that my packaging just wast working. I needed to redesign it and add and extra casing on the bottom to house the PCB boards and the battery pack. I have also decided that I need to take out the orange set of lights to make extra space and move the other rows further apart allowing all the wires to fit inside the packaging.I cannot change the size of the top part of the casing as i have soldered all the wires to fit a certain distance and do not have time to cut down each one make longer.
As i have taken out a set of lights i will need to modify my Picaxe program to fit with the changes.
As i have taken out a set of lights i will need to modify my Picaxe program to fit with the changes.
Changes to the case
as you can see from CAD screen shots below, I have moved the LED holes further apart to accommodate all the wires but not too far apart that the wires already in place wont reach. I also moved the slots slightly further apart to allow more room for the LED's
[Below] the new face plates
After re-cutting all the plates and fitting together, the LED'S fit inside successfully, however still need to create a bottom casing for the battery and PCB boards. I also changed the colouring of the acrylic to a darker green as this was more appropriate for a Christmas tree and the engraved design showed up better.
The base needed to be hollow, and relatively strong. I thought building up layers of squares would be a good approach. The only pitfall to this was it was rather difficult to glue and at times came apart. I tackled this by gluing small supports on the side to strengthen the joins.
New Base Design
Changes to the Picaxe programme
I took out the largest reset of lights from the diagram, i also realised that one of my output was on a pin which didn't allow an output so had to change it onto another available one. This also meant that i had to change my picaxe program.
Finished Program
I removed the orange lights from the program and changed my outputs to pins 4 (green) 2 (yellow) and 1 (red). it was quite hard remember that 4 is the first set of lights however soon got used to it. When the switch is on the lights start flashing starting off slow and progressively becoming faster and more random.