a journey of a thousand miles...

... begins with a single step - Lao Tzu, Chinese Philosopher, 604 - 531 bc

well, a thousand miles this is, my ever so challenging mini-laptop, I've been able to work on a bit the past few weeks! Meaning that I could finally proceed on the lighting again. In my head I've known for months what to do, but in ones head connections don't come loose all the time and once connected lights don't stay dark for unclear reasons either :).

in the real world they apparently do, with these tiny lights and ridiculously thin wiring anyway ;) [and my lack of experience in this department probably didn't help either]. I was thrilled that I was able to reconnect one of those leds to the wire again since I could't order any new ones and had a few laying around loosened form their wires and wanted to use those. And I not only managed to rewire it: it actually worked!

you see, I wasn't at all sure that that was possible, or that I could, because I have next to no experience in soldering and only have a regular solderingtip and not a special micro one that you would actually need for this kind of work. Also because the led is so small (about as big than the 'sand'/crumbs in your eyes when you wake up ;) the heat of the iron melts away that connection, so had to figure something for that too, but this makes the soldering even harder..


but it appearantly was possible, yay! But despite the soldering connections being pretty strong, surprisingly so, I had to reconnect them often because handling them they did come loose at some point, just being too delicate. And needed to solder again and again the times I could work on them, the same connections that is....

and then I finally had two together, and they didn't light up! Both of them worked, but not when tested at the same time. Later - because I kept thinking why and the connection between them had to be fine - I finally thought it might be the 3V coincell that is easy for testing. That should be fine using for 10 leds on one coincell, but that's in parallel, maybe not the series I was having my lights in. Had no idea if that would (or could) matter, knowing practically nothing about electronics (I also had to look this up, the parallel and series thing, had no idea what that was or how to call it, just knew there was a difference). But when using my 12 volts transformator, it appears that had been it, because now they lit up both! But the connection came loose again, because of having to handle them to be able to test it, no matter how careful I was. Arrghh!

why even bother with al this right? Well, it's simple: I really want to do this. And kind of like the challenge and overcoming all the hurdles and bumps it brings (wouldn't mind skipping them or at least part of them, but they do make me móre determined, not less). And I am sure I'll get it someday, because I know it is (or should be) possible and I will succeed! Hopefully befóre I'm an ancient relic, haha!

and to show you at least something: here's the little box (can't figure out the english word for it, freely translated from Dutch it would be 'feeder') with its blue light. I haven't shown that before, although that has been ready for ages (the box I did show once, but not lit I mean). Because I wanted to show it all at once, lit laptop, the blue light, all of it. But because that is going to take a while, here it is.