Results! It's solder-tastic

New videos! (below)

After spending from 11:00am to 5:00am in the engineering school our crack team of solder-ers have managed many milestones. All the cable is now complete. This means it has been cut, connectored, separated, stripped, soldered-to and then heatshrunk. Out of all the cables made (~500) there were only 3 instances of faulty cables (ie, bad solder joint). This is AMAZING as we did this over the course of two weekends with 30 different people helping throughout.

We found that by simply aiming the LED's at the back-surface of the test module and covering it with wax paper we get a nearly even coloring. We planned to do this eventually and include tinfoil and other exotic materials but were amazed when simply re-taping the LED's and having the light bounce off of the wooden backboard was nearly all we needed, as the pictures show.

Excitement for this project is building too. Last night we demonstrated our 4x4 pixel test module to the engineering student council meeting and impressed at least 30 people. This helped get people pumped up for Vertigo itself as well as our solder party we had today.
The Electrical Engineering Department gave us doughnuts on a nice platter to keep us going. They also took many pictures of us kids being constructive for publication in newsletters and viewbooks. Professor Cytron, the overseer of the software team (its a group from his class, CSE436, that is doing the software) has invited members of the media to Vertigo setup to cover the awesomeness that is this project.

We have videos of two of the test patterns included in the MIT code (not quite ready yet to write our own). These basically demonstrate the effectiveness of our current diffusing method (that is, re-aim + wax paper). We eventually may use nearly-opqaue plastic sheeting to get a more even look than wax paper but this works well for now.

Checkers
Diagonal