PROJECT UPDATE! FINALLY!

I dug up a soldering iron in my garage after my dad FINALLY told me we have one. However, it's only got one bit; i don't know where the rest are. It's like a flat head screwdriver. In addition, its stand is missing/nonexistant, which is just really hard to deal with and generally not safe, so i'm going to need to get my own iron at some point anyway.

MOVING ON!

This one required a little knowledge of soldering techniques. Had I not taken a couple hours to learn how to do it properly, it probably wouldn't have gone over well.

I know the picture's a bit blurry... anyway. See that little line of yellow down there? That's coming out of the Xbox cord. It doesn't do anything and is unnecessary for the project, so i just clipped it down to the end.

Each wire is paired by color. black->black, red->red, etc.



So, all I have to do now is put electrical tape around each individual connection, neaten up the project, test it out, and then I can file this under "done."

TWO project updates! Both good!

1. Male Caftan: Pattern has been pinned to the fabric!!! I have the edits for the body of the garment done, and the sleeves won't be too hard once Corn Pirate gets ahold of them. :D

2. CORSET!! I paid corn pirate in two bags of off-brand "gummy sour fruit slices" and two bags of York peppermint patties. By "bag" i mean those giant sacks you get at the grocery store. Then, yesterday, I bought the fabric for the corset. It only set me back $6, mostly because it's cheap satin lined with broadcloth, and the canvas i'm using in stead of interfacing is already being stored at the Robotics build site (No one will miss 5/8ths of a yard). I also bought the eyelets and bias tape, but the rest of the notions are really expensive. I need nearly 8 yards of boning, which is about $24 by itself. I also need a corset busk. Handcock Fabrics doesn't even sell those. Oh, also, it calls for ribbon, but I'm not going to buy that until I've actually seen how it turns out. The boning is what's going to kill me. But even if I assume the busk is $20 (no way it's more; if it is, i can bullshit my own), that brings the project cost (including bias tape and eyelets) to about $50 dollars. Add in the ribbon and laces and it's roughly $65 dollars. I know, sounds super pricy, but a fully functioning corset is $100, more if you want any sort of style to it. I save $35 dollars. For me, that's a new pair of glasses. No, future self, those aren't the frames I wore. You should know that since you still have the actual frames I wear now. They're bitching awesome!

Project Update: Amazing Dance Mat

The mat's been completely soldered up. However, I had to use a soddering gun that had a rather large tip and the solder itself was sort of big. It wound up being a two man job. David sent his dad to help me since he was in charge of the build site. Today's a teacher work day after all. XD
After exposing the connections, I discovered that the mat, being a third-party product, had differently colored wires. This is a bad thing. I went to the internet to try to find diagrams, but I was a tad pressed for time, and couldn't find a very clear one, so, like a genus, I GUESSED! :D Yeah... I prayed that the yellow wire on the mat was still the useless one, matched up the greens and reds, then guessed that black went to brown, and blue went to white.
 But, after attempting my first connection, we found that the gun tip was too big, so I just hacked off the entire xbox part (I don't even know where my original xbox DDR game is, and besides, Nathan just pointed out that the mat now works with a 360), and directly soldered the wires to each other. After soldering (David's dad held the gun and wires which had been twisted together, and I held the sodder), I put a small amount of orange electrical tape on each connection to keep them from touching. I had put sodder over every exposed bit of wire, so I was very confident about having no shorts (and even if I do, I'm screwed anyway). Then, David's father flattened the connections against the wire, and I just wrapped the whole thing in a lot of black electrical tape. The whole thing looks very neat and tight. I haven't tested it yet since I'm not even supposed to have it at the build site, but it looks great. I'll be very (m/s)ad if it doesn't.


*UPDATE* I currently have the mat plugged in to my computer. Nothing's blown up yet. ALWAYS a good thing. Windows detects that a USB device is there, but that its drivers aren't installed. Excellent, because when I plug in a hacked off USB cord with nothing on the other end, absolutely nothing happens. However, when I run XBCD, (X Box Controller Driver), it doesn't pick up the device. O_O

**UPDATE** The wiring is wrong. :(  I have two options: Build whatever the hell this is and use it to test what each wire in the xbox controller does, or just redo the connections until they're right. *sigh*

Project update: college apps. Tulane is completely done. I will be done with agnes scott in about half an hour when i request my teacher rec. Ksu will definitely be ready to go tonight, then i have to submit a transcript. Tech is on less of a time crunch, since i need no recs, but the app has to be in by the first, and i need to fix up my essay. I want to apply more places, but i don't know where...