lørdag 24. mai 2014

Han in Carbonite Completely Finished + 17th of May National Day Parade!

Finished!



Panels done and laid out:































Prepping Han for the National Day parade:







The cloth that goes under Han to cover the trolley:




Han transported to the garage at the firestation, where we changed into our gear before walking in the National Day parade:



Close-ups of the panels attached:
























Waiting to walk in the parade:




Strolling the streets of Trondheim (Nidaros) to the cheer of thousands of celebrating Norwegians:






Nearing the end of the parade, after walking for nearly an hour. And with the beautiful Nidaros Cathedral in the background:




A few shots back in the elevator at work:







Back up on the wall at work (before being covered with the plexiglass-frame/box), where he will hang indefinitely:










I'm very happy with the end result, although I always see stuff I want to do better.
The next time he'll get to catch some fresh air is at Trondheim Maker Faire this august.

torsdag 8. mai 2014

Installing Yellow LEDs On Second Sidepanel

I recieved the correct LEDs yesterday and proceded to solder the alternating flashing LED-circuit.
I used this tutorial as a base:

I prototyped the circuit on a breadboard first and added three more LEDs in parallell to the LEDs already in the circuit as well as replacing the capacitor with one with a higher value (330 microfarads) to get them to blink at a slower rate.

I took my cue from Kurtyboy and his excellent thread detailing his superaccurate sidepanels: http://www.therpf.com/f79/my-han-carbonite-panel-upgrades-23-nov-2013-a-113003/
There he comments that we see one row of the LEDs during the short scene (when Leia unfreezes Solo) and that only two are lit up, and don't blink.
But considering their configuration it would be natural to assume that they did blink, in some configuration, but that they maybe had a very slow rate of change.
Either way I'd like to think so, and Kurtyboy said "I suppose it would be neat to have them flashing alternatively but that's beyond me!", so I took it upon myself to have that effect on my own panels, to make them a microscopic bit more interesting to look at.

Anyways, here is the circuit on the breadboard:



I'm pretty sure there is a much easier way to do it, but that's the configuration I ended up going for. That's how you get things done, just choose something, and go for it. I could have sat around and thought about it forever, but then it would never have been finished.

And here it is all soldered, the backside looks like mess, but it works!





A short clip right after I finished it:


And a longer clip after I installed an on/off pushbutton:


Now I just have to get everything secured, and I guess the next update will be of the panels mounted on HIC himself!