Together-to-Make-a-10 Installation that Lights up | Making at Seeed Vol 5

Hello community,

Since the March and make are a perfect match, I would love to seize the last chance to introduce the 5th entry for the Making at Seeed Column today. In case you forget what this column is about, it’s a column recording the making stories happened at Seeed, to celebrate and embrace our making & tinkering DNA of Seeed.

As I mentioned in the vol. 4, we together with 252 Seeeders made a huge Together-to-Make-a-10 installation that could light up to celebrate the 10th anniversary on our annual party on January 26th, 2019. Today, the installation will be the spotlight.

Actually, it’s not a very complicate installation that involves many high-edge technologies, just 270 small pieces of PCBAs amounting into a huge 10 shaped installations. The PCBAs are pre-programmed, and they could change the lighting patterns automatically when they have been lit up. The reason that I wanted to share it with you, lies in the idea that it called all Seeeders to participate to make it a complete installation. It reminds me of the old saying: Unity is strength.

I might have been too long-winded. Let’s head to the story behind the making.

1. Every Seeeder got an small black rectangular PCB with several components including 3 buttons, 2 female headers, 1 battery, one switch and 5 GRB LEDs.

2. We need to solder all the components onto the PCB. If you don’t know how to solder, there are several soldering workshops organized by our engineers. What you need to do is to attend one of the workshop and get your soldering done.

3. If you have soldered in the right way, the LEDs will be lit up in red, green and blue when you press the buttons in turn.

4. When all the small PCBAs are collected, our engineers divide all 270 pieces into 30 groups, with 9 pieces in a group. The 9 pieces will be amounted onto a unit background PCB later, which will make the 9 pieces work in a unit.