[Thu Apr 19] Done With Lanterns + Final Project Ideas

Essie finished up our lantern project! We had a little change in design. Instead of letting the arch thing sticking up, we got rid of that and just drew the light-bulb shape on the top layer because we thought having the arch would make it difficult to carry around. We didn't make the LED stick out for the same reason. Also we switched to the brighter and bigger white LEDs because the little yellow and green ones were not bright enough to support reading in dark... We also used a 330 Ohms resistor to adjust the brightness of the white LED. We have the wires from the batteries and the legs of the resistor coming from the bottom of the middle layer, and have the legs of the LED and the switch (for model 2) coming from the top of the middle layer so we can connect them in the middle.

Here is the final design layout from Inkscape:

We have two different models:

(1) Manual switch:

You have to manually make the two wires in contact in order to light it up... Not that great but it works!

(2) Actual switch:

You can turn the light on and off by using the switch. That's good enough.

We thought that we would be the last group finishing it, but we spent enough time outside class to catch up and actually finished it before the other two groups did. Therefore, we moved on to think about our final project. Essie and I searched for ideas online and wasn't very successful. We saw pieces of small designs that we wanted to do but we weren't sure how to put all of them together. We bounced ideas around with Oscar and Oscar stressed that our final project must be user interactive. For example, our lantern project is not very user interactive because all we do is to turn it on and off. If we can somehow make it change the brightness by pressing the switch harder, that would be more interactive. Eventually, two project ideas drew our interest:

1) A dice that depending on which side it lands on, has LEDs light up on the top face of the dice
2) A piano that makes screaming sound because the buzzers and circuits that we used can produce very high pitch and screaming sound...

I thought they were both great because one uses light and the other uses sound. Eventually we decide to integrate the two: make project 1 and add a feature that when you lift the dice up, it's going to scream... just for fun...

We were excited to finalize our idea. Then we start to look for materials. We searched in the tool box and found lots of interesting things, for example, the male and female headers... We thought they were very interesting and would try to use them in our design.

We also got:
1) Pushbuttons
2) 4-pin Red LEDs
3) 4-pin Blue LEDs
4) 2-pin White LEDs
5) Switches
6) 330 Ohms resistors that go with red and white LEDs (blue LEDs do not need resistors)

We then started to put things on breadboard and made sure we know how to connect the devices.

This is a parallel circuit. The white LED on the left is controlled by the switch and the red and blue LEDs on the right are controlled by the touch buttons. It took us a while to test out how to properly connect all the devices since many of them have four legs and we haven't dealt with those before. But we got them all figured out with one of the battery models that we did for our last project.

I am so excited for our final project!