The chandelier has been installed!

My dad and I mounted an aluminum beam to a concrete beam near my ceiling, and the chandelier hangs from that.  Once the chandelier was hung, I added the butterflies that hang from the bottom of the chandelier.  I still need to make a light switch so that I can control the light, but in the meantime, since it communicates wirelessly with the digital assistant running on my main computer, I have full control over the light from my computer.  (See Flower Chandelier, part 1.)

So anyway … Woo-hoo!  The chandelier project is almost done!  I’m very excited.  This has been great fun, and I enjoyed dragging my Dad into the project. (I suspect he enjoyed it too!  :P ).  I got to work with materials that I had never used before, which I always find intriguing.  I advanced my knowledge of electronics and encountered lots of interesting design issues.  And I finally set myself up with some decent CAD software, for several reasons:  (1) I needed to communicate my designs to my Dad for the woodworking parts he made;  (2) I had to make sure everything would actually fit together like I wanted;  (3) and I needed to create files to direct the laser cutter for the acrylic.  In fact I ended up doing so much design up-front, that the end result looked pretty much exactly like I had envisioned!  Radical.  It was like, in my brain, and then somehow popped out into the real world!  woah

:D