Build Progress

Thanks so much to all of our backers! It’s not even a week and we’ve almost fulfilled our initial goal! The Kickstarter link is here if you want to help out.

It’s been a really busy and very productive week.
We got lumber and built the Big Box – this will house… well, everything – the computer, sound and light control, batteries, voltage converters and other power management. It will have a filtered fan to run air through the Box and keep all the components from getting too hot. We hope. This is one of the times to keep tabs on the temperature specs of all of your materials. (This weekend I learned the heat tolerance for industrial velcro, for instance. Handy!) Fortunately for us, the project will only run at night, and electronics generally handle cold better than heat.

BigBox

These are the relay boards that will control the light bulbs:

relays
I finished the build on the tiniest 24 channel amplifier!

amplifier

The other lumber was for mounting the solar panel array. (I’ve been calling this part of the build the panel-panel.) At first we thought we were going to use 10 of the solar panels, but the math has that down to six, so this is actually 40% smaller than what we originally thought:

panelbuild2

We’ve been taking stock of the cable supply to make sure we have long enough runs to get all the sound and power where they need to go, and taking this time to spool them all. This is a really tedious job, but we’re reusing cables from the installation on the Foshay Tower at Northern Spark, and I’ll admit it was hastily deinstalled. The runs are up to 125′ long, and were very prone to massive tangles. Doing this now will likely save us hours once we’re on playa, and spending those hours on a nice summer day in the shade is much more pleasant than in the hot desert sun:

cable

We also purchased all the steel rods that we’ll use to fabricate the lampposts; production on those will begin this week.

Once again, huge thanks to our backers. I’ll begin collecting information for backer rewards as soon as I can, so keep and eye on your email.

The Kickstarter link is here if you want to help out!