Yes, fair enough. They’re not all on at full brightness in my application. Still, 11½ hours is pretty good.
I got my battery yesterday, so after a full night of charging it, I plugged it in at 8:15 this morning - then an hour later, after realising that I’d not pressed the button (doh) turned it on - and it’s running ever since (so far 12 and a half hours).
As mentioned before, I would like to do some tests to see what sort of difference it’ll make to disable things (like the HDMI port), but for my purposes, it’s always running longer than I think I need - plus I don’t have the tools to properly measure the power drain - so I think I’m going to leave it like it is.
Thank you for your help, everyone, now I just need to perform some surgery. The battery will fit inside the body just fine, but the USB cable will stick out the top, so I need to find the monkey a hat, or so with plan B, and find a box to hold the battery, which the monkey can sit on.
Glad it’s working out for you :)
Post a picture when you’ve done it!
Spent a bit of time working on it this weekend, and this is what I’ve got thus far (click on the images to view them full size):
Very much still a work in progress (and lots of sloppy gluing and other unskilled making), but starting to resemble what I had in mind.
I need to find a way to hide the battery sticking out top of the head - I’m thinking a top hat (where does one get a top hat for a chimp?), and some type of diffuser for the scroll pHAT, maybe made out of paper, decorated in an interesting way.
I welcome all ideas and suggestions.
I wonder if some voile-type fabric would work to diffuse the light? You could disembowel the monkey and then replace his tummy with some voile, hide the Zero and Scroll pHAT inside. A LiPo battery plus an Adafruit PowerBoost would be smaller than your Powerbank doodad. Of course, our upcoming Tiny LiPo board will be an even smaller, neater solution.
The party is this evening, so after a month of doing nothing, I’ve had a mad rush this afternoon trying to finish it off.
The hat is the back part of a cap I bought from the Build a Bear Workshop - the original plan was for the chimp to wear the cap, but it was far too large, so this presented itself as a solution (I still have the front half of the cap, along with a mini tshit, both of which say “Party Animal”, which I’m going to use for some future project.)
The diffuser, which works fine IRL despite looking rubbish on camera, is make using a folded postit note.
The only thing I still need to do is decorate the hat in some way, which I’ll probably do using a school’s enamel pin (I’m friends with someone that works for a school supplier)…
…as soon as I get it from her this evening.
Finally, you’ll notice an elephant and hippo decorated with acrylic paint - alas these are not technical in any way (I was going to put some LEDs on them, but couldn’t figure out how), they’re just silly and fun.
The chimp award is for Community Spirit (which is what the message across the display says), and the other two will be given to the people who have posted the most, and have created the most popular thread.
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Looks great - I’m glad it all worked out for you.
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