Hi Steven here from Core Electronics! In this video we're going to put together the Paris Flyer CarouSol kit by Solarbotics.

Solarbotics make a bunch of these great laser-cut, self-assemble electronics kits and this is one of the more recent ones added to the collection. They've also got some great marble track ones that are a lot of fun to make, they all take about one to two hours to put together. So, in the kit we'll have our bag of laser-cut parts and we'll have our bag of electronics components, first step to putting it together is we want to put together our circuit board.

So, the Paris flyer CarouSol kit, it'll be a little solar-powered blimp that's going to drive itself around the Eiffel Tower periodically and the great thing about how these kits are made is the solar panel charges up the capacitor and then when it has enough energy to turn on the motor to drive the fan, it'll turn on the motor drive fan for a minute and then stop and store more energy again. So it works in all different light levels, when I was it when I was assembling this kit I found that the instructions include Solarbotics were really complete and didn't leave with me with a lot of questions when I was assembling it, about what I needed to do or what I needed to go and do next.

Something to be aware of when assembling the electronics control board is that a lot of the components look really similar, so be certain, read through the guide carefully to make sure you're putting the correct components in the correct place so everything works as you'd expect it to when you're all done. Now one of the things that I found quite difficult with these wires was it was really difficult to strip the insulation off the edge, the wire is really small and the insulation is pretty stubborn so what I'd really recommend doing to get the wire exposed on the ends is just use the soldering iron, melt the insulation back just the minimum amount necessary and I thought you'll find that that's much easier to do than trying to strip it off with wire cutters.

This next part of the electronics I installed the fan into the control system, one thing that I didn't find clear in the instructions was that later on you'll need either the fan removed or the wires not connected yet to properly install this. So put the fan blades on the minimum pressure necessary to get them assembled, now I moved on to the tower. Solarbotics recommends that you use white glue or wood glue to assemble the tower and any other glued on parts and the kit, I used white glue it worked great, something to be sure of is to try to get the whole tower assembled before your glue dries I mean this gives you quite a bit of time to assemble it but you might need to wiggle pieces around to get the next piece installed, so it's not a good one to walk away from when its half glued together.

Once the top of the towers installed, the next feature was just the decorative rails around the edge of the tower. In the video I use a hobby knife to remove all the little bits inside of the pieces but the knife really wasn't necessary to build the kit you could do that with a pin or anything else, to get all the little bits inside. The next part of the project I put together the housing for the electronics. As I mentioned earlier the wires in the kit are pretty small and delicate so be careful when you're placing  the solar panels into position, that the wires remain intact during that process, I had one come loose on me that I needed to resolder before securing it.

The next part here is the counterbalance arms for the blimp, I found these pretty difficult to install and they snap into position, there's a lot of friction so just stick with it with a lot of wiggling and careful pressure and it'll squeeze into place there's no need for glue on that part. Here I am struggling a little bit to install the pivot point for the for the arm to balance on, you screw the screw in and then push it into the slot and that holds it in place and I was just having problems getting that getting that in so I left it for the time being and came back to it and got a little bit later.

Here I move on to assembling the blimp, technically the durable though. The next step is to route the wires across the top of the arm and on top of the housing and then position the motor in place, like I said earlier the instructions didn't really make clear that I would need to press the motor through and bring the wires through the blimp and that was really hard to do with the fan on so I had to remove the motor to put it in place and then recited the wires, so what I'd recommend is leaving the fan blade off until the motors in position or putting it on really lightly so you could test your electronics and then put it on the fan once it's installed in the flip and that wraps up our quick build video for the Solarbotics Paris flyer CarouSol! kit thanks for watching!