K and I met and built the first power bus, and it got us to a full test: woo hoo! There was a lot of wire stripping, soldering, heat shrinking. At the end of it, we got to a working setup.

We had a couple of issues. The hardware-related ones I’ll detail in another post, but the one that really sticks in mind is that we wired one of the strand’s power backwards. When it was connected to power, the regulator got seriously hot. We noticed that, and it brought attention to the bug. Fixed.

Interestingly, when everything is setup correctly, the regulators do not get hot. They’re rated for 3A so perhaps the 1.5A the strands each pull doesn’t stress them. Great!

This is a terrific start for us. Onward!