For this assignment, I really tried thinking outside the box. And it finally clicked! In this assignment, I capture the process of me thinking and finally realizing what to do.
I start by making a circuit that is disconnected. It connects when two wires come into contact. I increase the length of the wires by attaching strips of aluminum foil to them using tape. Here is what the setup looks like:
And here is what I did with it:
I would agree with you if you said that the setup looks ugly, but I couldn’t think of any other way to do it. Maybe I could have made the wires longer so I don’t have to hold them up, and maybe I could have made them thinner. I will try to be more mindful of the design in further assignments.
When I showed this to a friend and asked them if they get it, they said “yeah, I think I have an idea 💡” and I couldn’t help but share this moment here 🙂
Initially, I wanted to create a secret entrance type switch with books, where if you aligned the books a specific way, the light would turn on (or in essence, the ‘door’ would open). However, this would require the use of hands in interacting with the books. So, I decided to shift away from this idea and play around with the use of one’s mouth in activating a switch.
I decided to come up with a switch that involved the use of a metal straw and how the switch would work is that the light would turn on when the straw touched the bottom sides of the bottle (to indicate that the straw is at the bottomest place possible). With that, I put aluminum foil at the bottom of the bottle (thankfully my hands could fit inside the bottle – making this project easier but not as easy as I thought, to assemble) and you would use your mouth to move the straw around the edge of the bottle and if you are at the bottom edges, the light would turn on.
The circuit itself is very simple – with the use of a standard circuit in turning on a bulb but adding an extra wire to the straw, and another to the aluminum foil a the bottom of the bottle.
Without further ado, here are some pictures of the switch and a video at the end:
I had so much fun doing this assignment, I couldn’t just stick to one switch. Initially, I had the idea of making the guitar strings my switch as when each string vibrates, it connects to a paper clip connected to a foil connected to the switch, turning on the lamp. I also connected different colored led lights so they can be triggered by different strings. However, I thought that this would require the use of my hands technically. Therefore, I came up with the idea of taping the foil to my eyebrows and making the lightbulb light whenever I make a “confused” face in irony as light bulbs usually stand for ideas.
I was then sleepy and got the idea of having the led light turn on whenever I close my eyes would be really fun. All you have to do is sleep and the light will turn on! My last idea was the hair straightener, where whenever I would straighten my hair, the light bulb lights. I am aware this requires the use of hands but, I wanted to include it for fun nonetheless.
Coming up with an idea for this was slightly challenging. I was inspired by ankle exercises I’ve been doing recently in which I would move my ankle around in different directions which gave me a few possible ideas.
Initially, I wanted to do a heel click with aluminum foil on my shoes with foil on the side of my shoes but when I connected the foil on each shoe to the wires, the LED would light up and produce a very faint light without the shoes touching each other. I then decided to wrap the foil around my shoe and step on the wire with it to make the switch.
I had one cable going into the foil inside my shoe and one cable under the shoe where I would step on it with the foil part of the shoe which would close the circuit.
At first, I was going to do a switch involving headphones but then I realized that that would require the use of my hands. So I moved on to another one of my limbs, the legs. I decided to make a switch that turns on when I sit down. I used aluminum foil to connect the wire from the seat, back to the light bulb. Then, I stuck another foil on my bottom which would connect the wires together and complete the circuit.
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!
Mostly my ideas involved the use of hands, therefore, my “creativity” led me to use my foot.
First of all, I made a circuit to turn on the LED light. Then, I connected two strips of copper tape to two wires. Copper tapes, which serve as conductors, were stuck on a bin and on a trash lid.
As a result, when a trash bin is closed, the light turns on because two conductors touch each other.
Generally, that was fun doing it and I learned some basics in working with basic circuits.
Back home, my brothers would get frustrated whenever I borrowed something from their drawer and didn’t close it properly. To combat this, I decided to create a simple mechanism that has a light turn on whenever the drawer is fully closed.
Implementation
To implement this, I created a circuit that was disconnected at one point. Connecting two wires would complete the circuit and light up the bulb. My initial idea was to have two wires taped to the insides of the drawer, but this failed since it was difficult lining up the two wires perfectly. As a result, I decided to use aluminum foil to extend the reach of the wires. Using a fat strip, I was able to establish a connection when the drawer was closed. Below is the circuit and a demonstration of the circuit.
Reflection
I felt like the most difficult part of this was creating a seamless integration of the wires into the drawer. As of now, the drawer is only able to be opened about 10cm before it falls out of the breadboard, so being able to have a long wire could fix this. Furthermore, the wire should probably go underneath or through the side, since I can’t place or take anything from the drawer while its open. Moving forwards, I also want to add another color designating the drawer is open, so that it’s more obvious to the user that the drawer must be closed.
For this week’s unusual switch assignment that we had to implement a simple circuit switch without the use of our hands, I used a real life example as my inspiration for this weeks exercise. Commonly found in cars and other vehicles was the brake light at the back of the cars which lights up every time you press down the brake pedal.
I started by making a simple circuit which would light up the LED every time the circuit was closed. Then I used two more cables to cut the supply to the LED row on the breadboard and also disconnected the ground to the main + and –bus on the breadboard. Then I used two wires to redirect the connection onto a sheet of paper and tape the ends of wire flat down onto the paper. In order to close the circuit and make the switch functional I came up with the idea of using aluminum foil which act behave as the conductor of electricity. By attached the piece of aluminum foil to the bottom of my shoe I was able to close the circuit. Through this manner I was able to light up the bulb every time I press down onto the sheet of paper mimicking the braking functionality in a car.
For this week’s assignment, I first thought about a switch that would turn an LED light on when you sit, and while this was definitely possible, I wanted to do something a bit more fun. As I was sitting, I got the idea to connect two clips to my septum ring and let the current run through the ring. It first started as a joke, I just wanted to see what would happen, but then I realized I wanted to use my septum as the switch or button. I struggled for a bit to decide how to make it a switch, by connecting the clips to the right the light was on, but because it was connected the only way to turn it off was to disconnect the clips. Somehow I came up with the idea to instead extend two wires with metal and have them touch the ring. I tested it out with my water bottle and saw that it could work, but I wanted something that perhaps doesn’t look amazing, but looks better than my purple water bottle. I used cardboard and hot glue to make a triangular pyramid and glue paper over it to make it look a bit better. The idea is to make the pyramid smell nice and when you sniff the LED lights up! (this only works for people with septum rings, although I imagine other piercings could work too)
