💥 “Blink, blink. ” From the microcontroller finally signals to the LED as it brightly flickers after multiple attempts, could it be? Or could it be something else? A bright orange light illuminated on top of the 2 pc battery holder soldered onto a buck convertor as our leader placed the first battery into its rightful place. No one, especially Andy, would not suspect a small orange light, right? The intensity of the orange-hued light grew with time. It was no longer as small as before. One underestimated the once small light, which turned out to be a steady flame fueled by the battery. By then, dark sooty flumes emitted and a strong plastic stench flooded the room. 🔥 “Fire, fire”, yelled Charissa. The flame roared, and Andy jumped back from the wooden stool he was seated on. He finally realised it was not a LED light but instead a fire had erupted. His mind is filled with thoughts or could also be blank from the shock who knows I am not Andy. His instincts kicked in, he narrowed his eyes and stared at the battery. After some time, he evaluated what to do next and he had to act fast or else the whole M&T would be engulfed in flames. He knew the risks, so he yanked the sole battery out of the holder. The battery was hot but he gambled on the risk. Thankfully, the flame dissolved away and left almost without a trace. Andy immediately fled off the exit as fast as he could and paged for Tony. He came back to the scene with Tony. Despite the flame to be put out, we all could waft that the entire room had the most off-putting smell on the entire earth or even the whole planetary system. We knew what a gas extractor is useful for, so we put it into good use as we targeted it toward the battery holder. Everyone could finally breathe better once the awful stink was gone. After this experience, we ought to be more careful in having the right connections before carrying out such activities. We carried on with other tasks, such as Jia Woei crafting the housing of the power bank in Fusion360, and Andy and Chermaine back to designing PCB with easyEDA. 

 

Black; it was the shade of the sofas where we started our tri-weekly meeting, the remarkable place such that ideations and deliberations were made. It was also the same shade as the battery holder that we worked on, the dark screen of an unprogrammed Arduino display screen, and the background of easyEDA. Like us, we started from nothing, with little background in electrical engineering. At first, it seemed really dark and grim, we couldn’t see the light on how to make this power bank. However, with the motivations of 🌟 Tony and 🌟 Qi Jie, we persisted as they shed some light on us and inspire us. We began to work some progress, for instance, the black 50kg servo motor was put into good use and we turn it into a generator and it could generate a remarkable power that could be detected by the multimeter, rectifications of the 3 phase motor of the AC to DC was done by soldering 6 diodes. We are in the works of storing the battery, attempts were made clear but we are waiting for success. More is yet to come but we look forward to finishing each checkpoint.

 

Yellow; we envision this very colour as vivid and bright. The yellow sun 🌞 greets us in the morning as we look up at the glass ceiling while we enter M&T lab. A lovely yellow jacket adorned by Jinghui gave her warmth from the harsh cold air coming from the centralised conditioning as she worked hard through soldering the diodes into the circuit board throughout that one afternoon. Yellow background as our logo flashes on the SSD1306 display screen, we were happy and claimed victory as it was our very first that the Arduino code worked. All hailed to our coding master, Charissa! Many tiny successes drive us forward to complete our final product, those are the little fruits as we wait for our bigger and better honeypot, the final prototype.

 

Come to think of it, black and yellow blinking alternately, what does it resonate with? A fellow small critter may appear in your mind. Yes, indeed, a bee 🐝. Like Plan Bee, we also never succeed on the first try hence the exact name. After many trials we have worked on, we aspire to be hardworking as a bee to race towards our goal, the emergency power bank. Each time we are inching closer to our goal.

 

At the end of the day, we hope that one day we will remember this vivid memory that we learnt and grew from like a flame. 🌠

 

~ JAC

❤❤❤ A big thank you Tony and Qi Jie for all the help and guidance!! ❤❤❤