The Petite Noel Project: Part 4 – Finishing

It’s been a busy past week but now I am all finished up for Christmas and in a thankfully-not-so-snowy Spain! So while I have some spare time I thought it best to tie up some loose ends here!

Last Wednesday Dundee Jamboree presented Petite Noel, a shopping event showcasing a unique and varied selection of bits and bobs by some very talented makers. I was there selling work on behalf of my sister, Rachael Claire – a graduate from the University of Dundee now living in Spain specialising in knitted textiles and jewellery (her website is under construction). Having never set up a craft stall before I think it looked pretty good!

Her work sold really well on the night and I think it definitely helped to be right next to the DELICIOUS selection of muffins, cakes and traybakes from Kitshinbake that were catching everyones eyes on the way in!

Back to the main topic though – my donation box was also exhibited on the night of Petite Noel! I’ll come back to that at the end of the post though, need to catch up with the making-of first.

Part 1 – Finalised and Working Code

The main issue her was that it was tricky to interrupt the dimming process mid-dim when the duration of the dimming needed to be around 2 minuites. A chat with Phil Gordon resolved this however – a sub counter within the overall counting down counter allowed for smaller pause durations to be used. As per usual, here’s the code for that!

turning Potentiometer with servo with interrupt

Part 2 - Embedding

In order to embed the Circuitry inside the top piece I set about doing a bad job of soldering it onto a circuit board:

A more structured attempt afterwards however and it all pieced together nicely

I designed the top unit so that, rather than glueing the electronics in, there where 2 screws on either side which secured the upper and lower sections of the top unit allowed for easy access.

Part 3 – Presenting

Dundee Jamboree decided that the funds raised through the donation box would go towards Caring Christmas Trees – a charity which is raising money, through selling Christmas trees, to support Dundee homelessness. It was from here that Dundee Jamboree bought their own Christmas tree.

It was a successfull and busy night throughout so I didn’t manage to get any documentation of the box until the end of the night when everything was getting tidied back up:

There is a video due to follow shortly demonstrating the tree in action but I have left that file on a pen drive back home so I’ll come back to that later.

Part 4 – Evaluation

The donation box managed to raise just over £20 which was not bad for 4 hours collection of loose change! However I feel it would have made more if its purpose was made a bit more clear. It may also have helped explain to people why the Christmas tree was looking a bit lack lustre with the fairy lights not on. This could probably have been done most effectively with either a clear sign or decoration on the box. I think that is definitely what I have to take into consideration for the next donation project: the purpose and the incentive to donate needs to be made as clear and simple as possible.

All in all though it has been a fun project and definitely a stepping stone towards what I am aiming to do for the final 4th year hand-in in May. Also, I now have a cool donation box that can easily be adapted for future events, either with fairy lights or some other outputs.

UPDATE::

The box made in into local newspaper – The Courier! Here is the scanned snippet from the Dundee Jamboree blog. How exciting – thanks to Dundee Jamboree for saving the image!