More on Phicon internals and the "Magic Light"

The high-flux LEDs arrived today for the internal lighting of the phicons. Discovered a nice, lightweight, small battery with a high capacity to use as the internal lighting power source for our Phicons. The CR2477 coin-type battery is 24mm x 7.7mm, 10g, and has 1000mAH capacity equating to some 9 hours of use before going dead based on 120mAH used by the 6 internal LEDs. However, even so, we calcuated that we would burn through these batteries very quickly during troubleshooting and testing and during presentations. At $25 per set to power all the phicons, this quickly looked bad--on the order of a few hundred to several hundred dollars of our budget just to light up our phicons over the course of the project. We then got the idea to place a 3-wire Magnetic Reed switch into the lighting circuit and hooking the LEDs up to the "Normally Closed" contact. Then we would place "rubber magnet" material in the bottom of our table's tray areas. When the reed switches came near the magnetic material, the contacts would then open. Thereby, the phicons would turn themselves off whenever one intuitively placed the phicons in their resting trays. Granted this would only work with certain cube orientations unless a more complex system were installed, this is an infinitely better solution than having to constantly open the cubes up and tearing everything apart to switch them off to save the batteries every couple of minutes when working back and forth. It will also be a cool factor for the user to experience.

A sample battery holder for the CR2477 was also ordered for installation in the phicon prototype.