When asked to do a switch that did not require hands, I am unsure why but my head immediately went to a paper boat. My initial idea was to have a little boat on a plate with water that, when blown would move, touch another object and BAM LED light turns on. Nevertheless my design changed significantly throughout my process.
The first step in my process was to create the circuits. I created a circuit with two LED lights of different colors that, if connected to a ground cable would light up the LED. Thus, the boat would activate a different led in a different side of the plate. My switch would then have three modes (Off, Yellow, Green). As instructed in class I used resistors of 330, red cables connecting to 5Volts and black cables leading to ground for the circuits. I then, used colored cables according to the LED they were working on.
After this was done, I spent some time re-learning how to build paper boats and trying them out on a plate. At this point, I realized how complex it would be to use water, considering the little control I had over the boat’s movement and direction. So I thought I’d just ditch water but keep the boat. I came up with this prototype, which made the connection circuit very unreliable. The paper was too heavy and, again, I had little control over its movements.
After a lot of testing and new ideas I got to a switch that responds to wind. Blowing to be specific. I used copper tape and wires as well as two popsicle sticks to build my circuit. I, again, realized that having a fully connected circuit needs a lot of attention to detail. I needed to spend some serious time making small adjustments to the cables’ position and alter small details that would make my switch consistent and easy to use.
Yet, I would not drop the boat idea. Many boats, sail boats run on wind. So perhaps my switch is a mechanism to indicate which way the wind is blowing into. This was perfect. I built a boat to put my switch in and on we go!
Final Product: 🌬
Here is how my circuit works:
Here is my boat: ⛵️
