This week I worked on the finishing touches of the word clock and I also worked on a small and short side project for one of my teachers Mr. L.
To start the week I worked on rebuilding the word clock in different ways to experiment with the invisible letter effect that the clock has. Depending on the spacing between the top layer and the LEDs, there will be a different effect, so I messed around with ways I could make it look best. What I ended up doing was adding a new 1/8 ” spacer into the clock and removed the top acrylic layer. I think that it came out looking very nice and this is my favorite appearance that I’ve managed to get.
The next thing I did was a short transition away from the clock to help one of my teachers with a shop project. My teacher Mr. L accidentally melted a wire that connected to one of the shops’ soldering station fans and asked one of us to fix it. I decided to take up the job because I have a personal project that involves splicing wires so I figured that this would help me in my own endeavors and it would also benefit everyone in the shop.
I started the project by cutting the wire to remove the melted section and I was left with two cables, one connected to the fan and one connected to the wall plug. I cut back the top rubber layer of the wire about 2 inches on both halves of the wire in order to reveal the 3 wires that were inside the cable. I then stripped about 1cm off of each of the small wires to reveal the copper inside and from here I was ready to start the connecting process.
My teacher Mr. Christy then came to me with these connectors that were designed to make connecting wires possible without having to splice them. I didn’t initially plan on using these because I didn’t know about them and the whole reason I got into it was because I wanted to splice but I decided to go forth with using the little connectors.
These are the mentioned connectors, essentially they are plastic tools with solder in the middle that can be melted using a heat gun to create a very tight waterproof seal that connects two wires together.
For this project, I used the red-sized wires because the wires I was working with weren’t very big.
I took the project over to the soldering station where we have the heat guns in our shop and I got to work on making the connections for the wires. However, before connecting anything I made sure to put a piece of heat shrink over the cable so that I had a way to cover these smaller wires like how they were before I directed the cord. I also had to tin the copper part of the smaller wires so that they would attach better to the solder in the middle of the connectors. I then heated up the tubes with the wires inside and ended up with 3 really easy and solid connections without having to splice anything,
My next step was to slide the heat shrink over the exposed wires and heat that up so that everything would be covered nicely:
I then took the fan and plugged it in at my desk to ensure everything was working and the fan turned on and was running just like it did before which is perfect. Overall I’m glad with how smooth this project went and how easy it was for me to get it done.
I then got back to the word clock and started to work on the PCB for the small clock. I was also told by my teacher that it would be nice if I could use a HUZZAH ESP32 Breakout board instead of the current ESP32 Feather-S2 that I have been using. The reason he wanted me to change which controller I was using is because the Breakout is much less expensive and they aren’t used as often in projects as the Feather-S2 so it won’t be a big deal that it is locked away in this clock on the wall forever. So I got to work re-designing the PCB using the new Micro Controller based on my old setup. (Breakout board is in front of the PCB schematic, Feather-S2 is on the breadboard)
Sacha's Site 