The LED strips we will be using for this project are the WS2801 LED strips. The reason for this is that this is an adressable led strip. Each led in the strip should be adressable seperatey, since every podium on our installation should be able to light up seperately. We bought 2 meters of strip, with a total of 62 leds. The leds need to be distributed among all the 15 stages. The first thing I did was deciding how much LEDs every stage should get. I made choices based upon the size of the stage and the size and amount of 3d models that would be placed on the stages. Resulting in stages with 2 to 6 leds each. I kept a few leds as spare parts, in case some might break.

Then I measured the distance between all the leds, every led had a different distance to the led next to it, so this took a while. Then i cut the leds up where needed. And soldered them together again with the right amount of distance between them. This took way longer than i expected it to take. I soldered the leds for each stage together and then would go on to the next stage, and would later when i was finished with each stage solder them al together to make it one long ledstrip again. It took me about 8 hours to finish the stages, way longer than i expected. For the last part, soldering all the smaller ledstrips together to one big long led strip I asked Jan for help. I would start at 15 and 14 and work my way down and he would start at 1 and 2 and work his way up. What i forgot to mention to Jan is that on each led there is an arrow, which indicates which way the current flows. this means theres only one right way to solder  them together, but Jan didn’t take this into account, as I hadn’t told him. When we met halfway and wanted to solder the two long pieces together I found out his led strip switched direction every now and then so we had to fix that. When that was fixed i found out that my led strip went the one way and his the other way. So mine went from 15>8 and his went from 1>7. This means we cant solder them together in the right order, but at this point I was done with soldering and decided to fix this with coding.

Under the stages i drilled holes to pull the led strip through. I found out that I could have thought this out better. Every now and then one of the wires would come lose while trying to pull them through the hole, and i had to solder them again. Now that I look back at it, it would have been a better plan to have used sort of plugs in which i could just plug and unplug each parts of the ledstrip. It was a good thing i kept some leds as spare parts because some even broke completely.