Team Birthday Cake designed and built a five-foot diameter, 4.5 foot high, 3-layer, telescoping, programmable LED lit, fiber glass birthday cake using 7,122 LED lights and more than 600 ping pong balls as decorative elements! These lights will display happy birthday text, graphic designs, and other images while the cake oscillates from 1 to 3-layers. Other than jettisoning some LED light density and brightness, as well as optional water & music features, our cake remains as we initially planned.  The telescoping design and details of the LED programming were the Team’s biggest challenges.  They had to switch out eye hooks for pulleys to accommodate the weight of the cake when used with a vertical actuator to create the cake’s movement, and step down the brightness of the LEDS – which at full brightness would have used 425 amps of power which would have not only been dangerous but ridiculously power consuming. 

The Birthday Cake has the distinction of being the only float to be placed in the Shawsheen River.  It took 4+ hours to transport it to the designated drop in spot at the river, figure out how to get it off the truck and into the water gently in order to not disrupt the methodical wiring work, then maneuver it down the river with a very strong current which took it directly into the rapids directly in front of Balmoral.  There was a struggle to free it, then secure it, but it was done!  And it was quickly determined that repeating the experience five more times with taller, heavier floats was not a good idea given the additional rain and mud coming our way.  A HUGE thank you is necessary to the Andover Fire Department who took on this unique task, and handled what quickly turned into a difficult endeavor calmly and efficiently.