When we left on Thursday, all we had left was two wires to solder to complete our lantern. At the beginning of class our professor asked us how long it would take us, and Erin said half an hour to an hour. I laughed, thinking it would take twenty minutes at most.... little did I know. One thing that I have about engineering is that is that everything takes longer than you expect it to.
We put our pieces together only to find that our lantern did not work. So we took it apart and tested the circuit with the power that we used for our breadboard and found that while our circuit worked, the battery connections did not. We didn’t really spend a lot of time thinking about the battery connections, assuming that we could easily connect them with metal plates on the top and bottom of the batteries. The problem was that we could not get the metal plates to stay in place on the plastic, and since the opposite ends of the batteries needed to be touching the metal plate, it need to be two different heights.
Our professor told us that Cailey and Maria had had the same problem with their lantern. I think they solved it by bending over a piece of metal so that one side was higher than the other. They also tried coiling up the wire into a spring and placing it where the battery needed to touch. We decided to try that, so we began coiling up some wires, but we were still having the same problem with attaching it to the plastic. Scotch tape just wasn’t working for us anymore! Next time we are going to try poking holes in the plastic for the wires to stick through.
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