Police Car
Concept
The concept of the creating this unusual switch was to use to design the circuit in such a manner that the LEDs lights would represent the alternating lights on a police car. Coincidentally, I also found a metallic bell in my room which I thought would be the perfect complement for this switch.
The following circuit was used to give this effect:
The red and the blue LEDs were connected in parallel each with its own resistor to each side of the bell. They are connected to the Arduino by a 5V wire and another ground wire. The second ground wire was connected to the center of the bell. The bulbs were initially placed in series but the idea was to light bulbs alternatively such that if one bulb is off the other can still turn on when the bell strikes the respective edge. The wires were attached to the bell as shown in the picture below:
Through this assignment, I got a much better understanding of how the rows and columns in a breadboard our connected to each other. I also learned the importance of using resistors after having short circuited two LED lights. I accidentally connected the whole circuit without using any resistors which led to the LED lights blowing up. Overall, this was a very fun project to work on and it was very creatively stimulating to design a switch using an external object.
Demo Video:
This is how the complete switch works: