moving on & letting go

photo of my father
Originally uploaded by bluepupae.

it was not an easy decision to make, and i fought it every step of the way. that's the way it is with me. change is difficult, that's why i give myself these challenges.

so my led project that is to be a photograph of my father, has been progressing abysmally slow. i still cannot say that i am halfway through. i also am only 30% sure that it will even work. i tried to do a test "swatch", but that took a zillion years and only somewhat worked. impatient to get started, i improved on the design, and started the final piece. after several more months and thousands of woman hours, my confidence wavered. i wanted to have faith that it would work eventually, if i kept at it. persistence or stupidity, only time will tell. i thought about all the bad relationships i had continued to work at long after they should have ended. i didn't want to come to this realization after a few more thousand hours of work. so i started to think that there had to be a better way. that it was better to take the losses--the thousands of work hours and cost of materials--and start somewhat afresh with a new approach. it is time to let go and move on.

there are a number of problems i have noticed with the current "design." It won't be easy to store. when i fold it up, the fabric gets wrinkled, and led & resister pins and wiring gets tangled up (are these all different, but related problems?). if it is more modular, and can be taken apart, it will be easier to store. i really like the idea of using fabric. of softening the appearance and feeling of the leds & technology, but the fabric is not working. i started to think about modular boards with pairs of leds & resistors, and having the wiring be connected in columns or rows, and the whole piece held together along the edges with thicker wire, like on my other projects. this would make it easer to take apart, and should an led burn out or be wrong, it will be more efficient to replace.

i also thought it would be better to unload some of the menial labor onto someone else or to a machine. no one is paying me to do this, and i am not able to work, and get paid while i'm doing this. well, if i could get someone to produce the boards at a cost that is less than the woman hours it would take me to do it times how much i get paid making websites, well, it would be well worth it. i will still be doing all of the soldering and assembly (can't escape all the work).

my next steps are to get prototypes made to test out the boards, then have the final made. there is a new hope and belief that the new process will take less time and be more likely to work than if i continued the way i have been going. i'm keeping my fingers crossed.