Physical interaction design DH2400

We had the problem that the light-thread (thin light) had to be fed with alternating current and the transistor, which had the base connected to the Arduino, was supposed to let the alternating current through when it was fed from the Arduino. The transistor didn’t like the AC so we had to get around the problem somehow. In an earlier stage we bought the DC-inverter which makes AC out of the DC, coming from the batteries inside.

The solution was quite simple but still genius, Frederic was mainly the man behind the plan. We opened up the inverter, got rid of the batteries and connected the battery-connections to the transistor outputs. When the transistor was fed with the DC from the Arduino it gave the inverter DC, coming from other batteries in the circuit. It worked like an auto switching battery. The inverter did its thing and gave us AC to the thread without going through the transistor.

This maybe isn’t the most advanced HOWTO but it can be useful, and we don’t want next coming groups getting trapped in simple problems like this. We still had problems with the cirkuit later on but we haven't determined that this depended on the mix between AC and DC but that might be the case. The light-thread is called Thin Light HighBright and we bought that and the inverter at the ThinLight-store on Brantingsgatan 39, Gärdet. There are nice people working there and they gave us some special price deal, 5 meters of thread and the inverter costed us 300 kr. www.thinlight.se