Solar Tree Update

Turns out one of the bulbs I was rewiring was glass...oops! I sliced my thumb open! Thank goodness for superglue (works great in leiu of stitches!)

I do have the bulb figured out. I just have to pick up some more LEDs. I accidentally blew them. Boo.

P.S. You would be amazed at the number of resistors, capacitors, etc inside a single energy efficient bulb!

Jack and I worked on the Arduino Friday...err, rather Jack worked and I watched. We should be good to go very soon (we'll have to be...as the installation is very soon). I'm going to rig up our bulb thing tomorrow. Sadly, I have a Chinese Art and Arch quiz I have to study for and an art show to install, so I won't have much time to dedicate. 8 more days of class!!

still working on the arduino...and cussing a lot. i love to hate art...

revised announcement

sketch

the colors are totally off for some reason (text is brownish gold and our name/info is dark blue almost black looking)
I don't love it/ don't hate it... just a small idea of something? seriously open to suggestions

Hey what about this as a bg for invite

hey so... just an idea, we can fade it out more to let the text have more of a pop... keeping it simple
or another idea for the flyer would be to have a plain background with a sketch outline of our tree branch with the cells on it-- kind of like blueprints for the object (looking blueprinty)

brainstorming keywords to work with:
definition of daylight: light of day; knowledge or understanding of something that has been obscure
photosynthesis or photosynthetical; pseudosynthesis
mediation or interference
natural/nature ( not ruling it out... i feel like we can expand upon it & make it fit a little better tho)
glow vs. aura
cellular
technical

Reference (IM with the electrical engineer):

Me-hello electrical engineer, this is artist speaking...
- allright i guess we'll just start off with what you are trying to do and what you have done so far
Me-hey! so we're trying to hook up solar cells (calculator ones) and make them light up a d/c lightbulbwe've tested out paralell and serial circuits along with adding amps with batteries (b/c we thought we lost some) but it isn't working out
-amps?
Me- uhhh I dunno... we thought that since we were getting a whole lot of volts (enough to power the lightbulb) that something else was going wrong, so my partner suggested adding uhhh something from batteries (i don't know what it's called-- she says amps)
-have you tried to light the led without the solar cells?
Me-yes and that is working we have a volt meter also and we are getting high readings with that
-how high?
Me- well when they are all hooked up we get about 18 V, our battery is 12 V
-what kind of led are those (name/model)
Me- 5 mm? We are currently doing a test in class with a bunch of the smallest leds to see how that goes... we really want to power a lightbulb though (it's energy efficient12 V d/c
-um do you have a spec sheet of ur 12V d/c lightbulb, or a link to a website that has the spec sheet?
Me-yeah hang on let me get you a link http://store.sundancesolarcorp.com/12voldc11wat.html
-calculator solar cells won't be able to do this
Me- well if we are getting enough volts we thought it would work... why not?
-solar cells generally don't generate that much current for 9 watts
Me-is there anything we can do to up the watts?
-what you need is current you need .75 amps of current: which is alot
Me-we just tested it with leds and they are also not working... don't those just need a small amount of amps?
-yea
Me-do u know why it's not working?
- is one side of the led longer then the other side?
Me- haha just kidding yes lol
-you might have connected them wrong up since one of the sides has to go to the positive side and the other side has to go to the negative side forgot which one it was but you can easily google it and then you have to put a resister in there somewhere before or after the led so you don't blow the led if you tried to do so without the resister, it'll just show bright for like 1 sec and then burn out
Me-the multimeter is reading 5 V, yeah we had it hooked up right... long is positive , we have the cells hooked up serially (fyi) ... we haven't even gotten it to light up at all... no amps at all
-might be the resister could have blown ur led
Me-we didn't put a resistor in...
-exactly you need one
Me- so then if we put a resistor in it should work?
- if you haven't blown ur led yet
Me-we have tons more to work with--can we add watts in any way to our system to get power for a lightbulb?
-watts is not what ur looking for
Me-oh sorry i mean amps can we add amps in any way?
-if you find like a power source (ac-dc adapter) you could hook that up to a bread board and test out ur circuit
Me- ok well we will def. try that and possibly be trying to talk to you again