Fun with a soldering iron

So down to the nitty gritty and for the past few weeks Eleanor has been burning patterns into paper and experimenting with burning effects
And then getting down to the solid work of churning out 66 of these trees. This took almost two weeks and about 100 burns from the soldering iron


One of the trees held up under a tungsten light source in the studio to give an idea of the effect:
It was then my job to take these papers out to Emcon in Dublin and load them up into the perspex rods that would protect them and give them form. A photo here before the fiddly job of getting them in the tubes:

Here is one I prepared earlier:
Here are some more I prepared in their little protective sleeves. It was at about tube no 30 I begin to realise the scale of the task ahead.
A view down inside one of the trees:

Once this job was done we fired up the LEDs in the tubes to test for any failures and to burn them in for a few days to catch any early board failures. Whilst I had been filling the tubes, the lads at Emcon had been building the control system and wiring and soldering all the LEDs and really pulling out all the stops to make this piece as easy to assemble at the other end as possible.

The guys at Emcon were able to hang them from the their cable supports and we could start putting some of the moving light programming through the system and getting a sense of what it was going to look like:
I then came to London last week and Peter Barry had rigged up a remote webcam and web link to the programming computer to allow me remote access to program the lighting effects at my leisure: