User:RaRickert/ENES-100:/Bicycle Turn Signal

Week 1
During this week my group transitioned over to the bicycle turn signal project. We split the project up into three parts. Mike is in charge of the coding, Heidi the housing (and 3-D printed items) and I'm in charge of bringing the physical components together. We needed to have all the LED's (only started with 50 5mm super bright yellow lights, but no red) connected to wires that would join together again, the idea being to keep the wiring from becoming confusing. In order to take on this project I had to learn to solder - a skill that I did not possess, yet.

To learn how to solder, I went to youtube. I checked out |How To Solder - Intro/Joining Stranded Wires - Part 1 and |How to Solder - The Basics. Then I checked out |How to Solder an LED and |How To Solder A LED Light. To make sure I got the concept I practiced on some wire to wire connections and spare LED to wire connections. Then I started to solder some LEDs and lights together.

Week 2
This week started pretty rough. The plans for the light layout and the wires changed a little, so I had to use a heat gun on all the connections I had made thus far. After this was done I put the 5mm LED cover on all the LEDs. Each end (1 pos and 1 neg per LED) needed about 2' of wire so that we could wire everything together when the housing was printed and ready to go. I used Black wire for the positive (all I had at the time) and later got different colors for the negative (so that I could differentiate).

Some connections were fairly poor, until I figured out that if I twist the wires together before I solder, the task was much easier to do.

Week 3
This week we put it all together. Mike's code, Heidi's housing and my lights. After a few initial hiccups we got the lights working perfectly. The hiccups included, but weren't limited to: misunderstood pos/neg wires, wires in the wrong arduino/breadboard slot and much more, but the point is; we got it to work.

If we had more time we would hook the rest of the lights together and finish the housing before we moved on to testing.