Saturday, April 7, 2007

I can't believe it. It took me almost a week thinking about what the issue was with low. I thought several times I had the issue licked only to find the Tank Light would flicker or behave strangely only in low. High and medium seemed fine. I finally traced down the problem to a formula I dinked with in revision 1.5 for servoing the LED current. I thought I had an error in the formula and changed one of the numbers.

I re-ran the calculations and found that I had broken it and not fixed it with the number changed. So, back to the way it was before. Now low seems to be fixed. I also took the time to correct the displaying of the battery voltage adjusting for the voltage drop across the diode or circuit in the front end since the battery pickup is after the diodes. I think I will tweek autoleveling once more to reduce the window size to allow for it to detect daytime a little more sensitive.

It took the afternoon of Thursday to cut colored tops to see what looks good and works and what colors don't look good. I also cut both the 123 and AA tops in the clear blue and cut the frames for both sizes. Yesterday (friday) I spent the majority of the day gluing the tops to the frames and completed attaching a frame for all the blue tops I have. I need to get back to soldering more AA lights and finishing up more 123s.

There is one more pending feature I might try to incorporate now and that is to implement a special menu function to change the I'm awake blink time from fast (15 seconds), slow (30 seconds) and off. Although, I think off is not good as there is no indicator during the daytime that it's running or dead.

I need to characterize the photo sensitivity in all modes and measure the lux to turn off/on the light.

I won't be able to do anything till I get more turrets and cannons made. This will take another week or so before I will get any quantity of turrets.

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