For my unusual switch, I instantly thought of a guillotine. It appealed to me because the words “hands-free” made me think of how guillotines kind of symbolize hands-free killing – you didn’t kill the person, you just put their head in a place where gravity would deliver a knife to deliver the final blow.
In the same way, my hands don’t actually connect the switch. I just lift the guillotine into a position from which gravity finishes the job.
First, I sketched out my design for the simple guillotine, with a place to insert someone’s “head” at the bottom and a smaller piece of cardboard with copper tape at the bottom to serve as the knife. Instead of someone’s neck, I would place the ends of two wires in the guillotine. When the “knife” hits the bottom, the copper tape conducts electricity and connects the two wires, completing the circuit.
Then, I started crafting. I found some copper tape and started tracing out pieces of cardboard. I decided to connect my pieces by intersecting them at cut slits, which would be cleaner and more stable than hot glue.
From there, I cut the pieces out with a box cutter and assembled them. My intial prototype looked great, but the knife would spin and go everywhere as it fell down. To remedy this, I added hot glue “tracks” to guide the path of the knife, added a cover that would ensure the knife fell in a straight line, and inserted two washers into the cardboard to make it heavier, and therefore fall in a more guillotine-like fashion.
Just for fun, I made a little tombstone in front of which the LED lights up, so it kind of looks like a candle in front of a grave (probably of the person who died in the guillotine.) I embellished the guillotine with a little of my extra copper tape, hooked it up to the Arduino, and tweaked it until it worked.
I’m pretty happy with the finished product! The guillotine is sturdy, the “switch” works when the knife goes down, and the if you turn the audio of the video on, the slice of the knife sounds pretty compelling. In a future version, I might try to add a pulley system or a platform so that it’s even more hands-free (right now the video makes it look like it’s still responding to my hands), but for something small, portable, and mobile, I think this is great. I’m excited to do more fun stuff with Arduino!
