Concept:
The idea of using tissue box as a part of my assignment came absolutely out of the blue while I was sitting in the IM lab in the dark, staring at the screen and having no clue where I should begin. Then I saw a tissue box in front of me, so I thought, ‘why not?’ and decided to make the LED turn on when I pull out a tissue paper from the box.
Process:
I first created a basic LED circuit, which I based off from one of the examples that professor Shiloh gave during this Tuesday’s lecture. Then, I played around with the wires’ positions and figured out which placements allowed the LED light to turn on. Once I had that down, I added two blue wires to the circuit that connected the LED light, to which I added two more pieces of wire that I cut from a thin wire coil. I wasn’t really sure whether wrapping the wire pieces around the end of each blue wire would work, but thankfully when I tested it by making the ends of wire pieces touch each other, it turned off the LED light that was previously on, which was what I was aiming for. Here’s how I wrapped the wire pieces around the ends of blue wires:
Then I just twisted the ends of the two wire pieces in a way so that they will be connected to each other but still loose enough so that they will be able to turn off and on based on the movement of the tissue being pulled out as the wires’ contact will be disrupted by it, like this:
Final Product:
Here’s the final overview of the project:
…and final videos of it running!
Reflection:
This was surprisingly simple and less time-consuming compared to all the other projects that I’ve done in this class so far; I think it’s because it didn’t involve any coding, which is what I usually struggle with! As a person who loves hands-on projects, I definitely enjoyed getting a tangible result at the end of the process. 🙂