Electronic Technologies – Week 06

Just a quick catchup on this subject, as it leads into posts I’m about to put up about my major project… I grabbed an infrared LED electronics kit a couple of weeks back from Jaycar. The assembly was surprisingly easy – considering my soldering experience amounts to about 30 whole minutes – but my lack of knowledge fell down when I realised that I couldn’t get power into the circuit board.

Fortunately, there’s a unit (I’m not even going to pretend I know what it’s called) at uni, which can send varying volts and amps into pretty much anything. This trusty box told me that I needed to get around 12V or so at 300mA pumping through those invisible diodes, to get it going. Back to Jaycar.

Up and running (but for the time being, still lacking a more permanent fixture), I did some testing with the light and infrared camera. Straight away it was obvious that it was creating a hot-point of light, and wasn’t going to give me an even surface to create an interface with.

A hot tip from Julapy sent me to the art supplies store to grab some tracing paper, which did the trick perfectly. Using the paper as an intermediary between the light and camera diffused the light hugely. In the following video, you can see the effect that diffusing has over the right side of the frame…

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…more info on that in the next Professional Portfolio post.