Stage 6 - Shadow House - Wiring Finished

I apologise for taking soo long to get back to this project but this is what happens - life gets in the way.
I have finally been able to spend some time finishing off the wiring. Well I say finishing - starting would be a better description because of course I ran out of materials and have had to stop and go and buy them but I will put up what I have completed at the moment.

These are images of how the 'vine' has been placed over the 'house'.

The first thing I needed to do was to find the photo (which of course I forgot to take) of the layout of the plastic tubing over the top of the gourds. (I will go back into the appropriate post and add this bit in as it will make things a lot easier to have on hand the photo). My post 'Using 'vines' to hold the wires for a hanging House' may help. Click here.
It is necessary to ensure that the layout allows for the wires to go into the rooms to connect up with the white plastic tubes that are sticking out of the shell (they are indicating the hole for the wires are to be placed into. See Shadow House - Stage 4 - Window Coverings).

Once I had placed the 'vine' over the gourd I then tied 'branches' that overlapped onto another together.

I then pushed the wires for the internal lights into the shells and out of the window so I could add the light bulbs and resistor. You will see that I like to cover them in the clear heat shrink tubing. This is because I have a head like a sieve and a forget where or if the resistor has been placed. This solves that problem. See the photo below on the left.

  

The photo on the left is one of the white lights for indoors. The photo on the right is the blue lights lit up.

In this model (to save money) I am using old Christmas lights that had run on solar power. Just because the solar power pack doesn't work does not mean that the lights do not work. I am using bright blue lights for the outside and white for the inside. Please note that if you choose to use Christmas lights yourself they generate just a fraction more heat than LED's. I will show you how I work around that later in the next post - Decorating the Light Bulbs.

When testing your lights use an LED - Tester.

 I have been able to come back to this blog.
When it comes to wiring everything together I have already written a post on this. Click here.
I have now included a photo (below) of the battery packs (7), the switch and the sets of wires (21 = 42 wires). I thought I should explain a few things. First every 5mil LED bulb as a 300ohms resister soldered to it. Second, as you can see if you look at the wiring closely that a number of wires have are around the wrong way.  Ordinarily my white is the positive and black the negative. This did not always turn out that way. You can see on the photo above the 'B' and the 'W' on the masking tape. Those letters tell me that I have the wires around the wrong way. The 'B' shows me that the 'black wire' is now the positive ( white wire) instead of the negative.
As I go through the whole process of wiring the positives and the negatives together it is necessary to test each sets of wires to make sure all wires end up being in the correct group. I also found taping the groups together with masking tape made the whole process a lot simplier.