Pop-Up 4/23

    On Monday we finally began working on our final project. As I mentioned in my last post, we are working on a light-up-pop-up book. We decided to make our pages Harry Potter themed, since we’re all huge nerds. It also makes sense, because if pictures and paintings in the wizarding world move and talk, pop up books probably do something even cooler.
    We decided the most important thing to focus on was getting the circuit for the lights to work, and we would worry about the fun pop-up illustration parts later. Our professor said that we just needed to build an oscillator, like the one we had built earlier in the semester. So, we looked back at our notes and tried to build it, but for some mysterious reason we could not get it to work. While we were waiting for our professor to help us with our circuit we Hannah and Erin left to talk to prospies about engineering, something I don’t consider myself even remotely qualified to do. Our professor helped me with our circuit, but he actually ended up just building a new one for us. He changed it because in our original oscillator oscillated between -12 and 12 V, so the ground that we fed into V+ was zero. Since we want to use batteries to power our pop-up we only have a range of 0-5 V to work with. He put a voltage divider on our circuit to make a “ground” of 2.5 volts that went into V+. Then depending on the value of our resistors, we could change the brightness and frequency of our LEDS.
    As a group we have had problems focusing on our projects in class. We are much more productive when we work outside of class, but we wouldn’t have to work outside of class if we could just concentrate. With three of us it has been a little difficult for us to delegate the tasks so that each of us has something to be working on. I am reading Imagine by Jonah Lehrer right now, and he says that intense focus actually discourages creativity. But with only a couple days of class left what we really need to do is buckle down and get something done, especially since our last project still does not working.
    Speaking of our last project, I thought of one more way that we may be able to fix it. The problem with our lantern was that the batteries did not stay in place. I decided to alter our design slightly to split the body into a top half and a bottom half and sandwich another octagonal piece (like the top and bottom) in between them to put the top part of the battery connection on. Here is the drawing:

Then I can cut holes in the middle piece to stick wires through, so that I do not have to worry about gluing or taping them to the plastic. This also makes it easier to solder the battery connection to the circuit since the wire that I need to connect it to is on the right side. I want to make the battery connections coils like Essie and France’s. They coiled the wire in to more of a cylindrical shape than like a spiral, which is what we had tried before. My professor told me that I should also glue the piece that we had been using to hold the batteries before to the bottom and middle piece to hold the batteries in place in the other direction. So far all I have done is cut out the pieces, but I will play with this more on Thursday.