*Disclaimer* I am an idiot when it comes to circuit boards and such so for anyone about to read on please forgive me if I call or spell something incorrectly.
Dome lights. I have been dreading this part of the build. I have no background when it comes to wiring and circuit boards. I never hooked up a car stereo. Actually, I did, once. Just not correctly. It resulted in a very nice electrical fire while driving down the road. Needless to say I was not anxious to start this portion of the build.
The dome lights make up all of the lights in R2's head. There are two Process State Indicators (PSI's) and the front and rear Logic Displays (FLD & RLD). As I am also a slow typer I will be referring to them moving forward as they are abbreviated.
Once again the great group of builders at astromech.net came through. A run of dome light kits were offered and I jumped on board. Having recieved the kit I was a little nervous as it included the circuit boards, LED bulbs, sockets, pin headers, microchips, cables and etc needed to build the PSI's and Logic Displays. I purchased a soldering iron and a "Helping Hand" from Radio Shack. My brother in law walked me through the basics of soldering and after watching the tutorial for the kit a dozen times I felt ready to get started. I began by taking the circuit board for the RLD and soldering on the sockets. I would put them where they needed to go and then use blue painters tape to hold it in place so I could turn it over and solder the leads. The picture below is of the RLD with the sockets soldered in place. As soldering involves a very hot soldering iron I did this portion of the build without the boys as I did not want to risk them getting injured.
The above picture shows the RLD circuit board turned over so that my solder points are visible.
The next step was to take pin headers (in this case a double row of 5-pin headers) and solder them to the board to allow a place for the cables to attach. Likewise I soldered the small green screw terminal to the board. As you can see in the picture below the pin headers have to be cut to the pin count that you need.
The idea behind all of this is that once built, not only will the lights work but they will flash in a random pattern to simulate R2 having thought processes. In order to do this an Ardunio mini processor was installed. I began by soldering the socket that would hold the Ardunio chip and then installed the chip as pictured below. I also soldered on the three transistors.
The next step was power. I used a Pololu 5volt regulator. Basically the Pololu takes a 9volt batery charge and converts it down to 5 volts which is all that will be needed to power the lights. I started by soldering another 2-screw terminal to the 9volt end of the Pololu and a double row of 4-pin pin headers to the 5volt end.
Next I attached a 9volt battery terminal lead (purchased from Radio Shack) to the 2-screw terminal.
The next step was to use a 2-pin cable and connect the Pololu regulator to the RLD board and connect a 9volt battery and see if the light on the Ardunio came on. It didn't. I cussed and yelled and found that the problem was the lead on the positive end of the 9volt terminal wire had been cut off when I tightened the screw terminal so after stripping the wire and re-connecting it the light came on.
The next step at this point should have been to install the LED bulbs for the RLD however, an upgrade kit with brighter bulbs became available as several builders thought the RLD's could have been brighter so I am still waiting for those to arrive. Instead, I began assembling the FLD's. Below is a FLD board prior to any work.
Once again I started by soldering the sockets to the boards.
Using the tape to hold each component in place I soldered on the socket followed by a double row 5-pin pin header and then the transistors. R2 has two FLD's so I had to do this to two boards.
With the help of my "Helping Hands" from Radio Shack I was able to get all of the main components soldered.
(FLD with Pin Headsers and Sockets Soldered)
Now came the scary part....the LED's.
For every little hole you see in the above picture an LED bulb has to be installed. This seems like no big deal until you try to solder all of the leads and have little to no area to work with. The solution...install every other bulb, trim the soldered lead, then go back and do the next set. The lights are blue and white LED's and I used the following pattern that I found on the astromech site for bulb placement.
Did I mention the bulbs are small?
Luckily for me my brother in law stopped by to see how I was doing and leant a hand. Once they were done I used the custom bezels included in the kit and attached them to the aluminum logic displays I showed in a previous post to have the following:
And now the finished product.........
I still have the RLD LED's to install which will be a combination of Green, Yellow and Red LED's and the two PSI's. As soon as I recieve the upgrade kit I will get back to soldering. Stay tuned...more dome lighting to come. Oh yeah, I managed to burn the crap outta myself with the soldering iron.
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