This year’s Pinewood derby entry used a little flexible pcb (fpcb) that we yanked from yet another “flame” light bulb. I used the same bulb once prior for the Starship ornament upon discovering that the manufacturer simply rolls up the board into a cone and uses a second tiny step down circuit to convert 120vac to just a 3.9vdc circuit- perfect for those tiny batteries we just received for the “JokeMachine” project. I actually just received some new tiny silicone flexible LED microstrips “filaments” too, but we ran out of time to add them. We also drilled a brass weight into the back plus one arcade token from Abari to make it to 5g at the last second. We’d originally modeled the pcb in CAD and printed in transparent petg with the thought that we could just heat and melt it over, but then realized this is a great application for “Friendly plastic” meltable pellets. It’s pretty fun material to work with, but also nicely translucent- although it wasn’t diffusing the LED’s enough and we wanted more flamey texture, so we added not only half-melted color pellets but also transparent and irridescent glitter to increase internal reflection. The end result turned out pretty well and we came home with a “Most Creative” award! Here’s the build & race video: