In order to light the pieces up at night, Stephen designed a custom electronics pack to go into every piece.

Stephen should write some more descriptive text here, but basically the board consists of a sensitivity-tunable photdiode (to turn the lights on and off at night), a transistor to convert the battery voltage to the right level for the LEDs, a zener diode so that the lights stay at a fairly constant brightness as the battery runs down, and finally a bank of resistors for the LEDs attached to that particular piece.




Here's a closeup of the board for a Pawn, with 6 resistors for the LED's around the helmet. Still to be added is the zener diode, as well as the resistor for the super-bright LED in the pawn's body.




Building all 32 (+ spares) electronics kits took quite a bit of time. This work is usually done by robot nowadays: and after a full weekend of soldering, we all knew why!




This picture reminds me of that scene from The Wall...

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