Saturday, January 19, 2008

My prototype light / evaluation

My prototype light - Michael 11dtm

For our prototype light we got a box witch was cut out on the cam machine. First I had to clean up the edges then I had to scribe lines on it to fold along. Once I had done that, I used the metal bender the bend up the sides of the box. One problem I came across was I had bended 2 opposite sides; I could only bend the other sides about 50°. So I had to bend it up to 90° by hand. I had to mark out two holes so the wire for the solar panel could go through. One thing I did was centre punched where I going to drill the hole. I decided to use a 5mm drill not a 3mm drill as the teacher said, so I ended up having a 5mm hole and then a 3mm hole next to it on top of the box but it did not matter because the solar paler went over top and covered it up if anything it made it better when It came time to put the solar paler on. I also bent the box before I marked out and drilled the holes. The next step was I had to make up four brackets for the corners of the box. First, I had to get bit of scrap aluminium and scribe out a row 20mm wide then scribe 40mm long and then divided them in half. Then I had to mark two holes on each side of the bracket. Then on the other side, I had to make two more holes which where out of line with the previously marked holes so that when I put in the rivets, they wont stick into each other. Then I used the centre punch to punch where the holes are going to be. Then I used a 3.3mm dill bit to dill the holes and then I used the guillotine to cut them in to 4 bits then I used the metal bender to bend the bracket. Then I placed the brackets on the corners of the box and used a cordless drill to drill the holes in the box for the rivets to go through. Then I used the rivet gun to put the rivets on then I did the same thing to do the other 3 brackets. I used a 3.3mm drill bit for the rivet. The rivets where 3.2 mm then I pulled apart my warehouse light and took the circuit out and I modified the circuit. I had to get a different circuit because the one in the light that I pulled apart was covered in hot glue thanks china. I got given another circuit to de solider. I had to de solder the LED and the wires. Once I had done that, I had to add two more LED in parallel. I also had to add a new battery holder but used the same battery as it worked ok the hardest part was soldiering on the solar panel. When I went to put the panel on the wire kept on breaking off but in the end I hot glued it on then I put silicon sealant around the panel to seal it up then I screwed on the bottom of the box on I used 2.5 mm self tapping screws to attach the two plates and it finally it was all working good. I think that my prototype light was a bit of a disaster because I don’t like the way the box turned out. The edges did not all match up that good but I was happy with the way the circuit turned out. Next time I would spend more time on the box and line up the holes better and put the bracket on nicer but over all it was a good out come and so on and so on.