LED blow-out (Charlotte and Kendall)

In the finishing stages of our project, we had the unfortunate experience of having our LED strip blow-out. We didnt neccesarily know how or why the lights had suddenly stopped working. We had to test out a lot of different things to figure out the cause of the issue. After talking to Dominic for over an hour, we tried re-doing the wiring, testing the power transistors, and buying new batteries.. but everything lead us to realize that something had gone wrong with the LEDs. Once we had figured this out, we thought that perhaps only the first set of LEDs had been burned out (somewhat comparable to christmas lights). Thus, we cut off the first strip of three LEDs off, and cut off another strip of three just to test if there were some surviing LEDs. We soldered these and to our relief, they easily turned on! This meant, that our whole strip wasn't dead..and we wouldn't have to rush-order new LEDs. We then soldered the remaining LED strip, and were able to move on to the physical building of our lamp's interior. Although this set us back time-wise, it was still a learning experience because we were more able to understand the relationship between LEDs in a strip and how they transfer power.. as well as gianing a bit more soldering experience.