This past month, during the holiday break and some chilly weekends, I've had some time to work on more personal projects. The first was an assembly-line production of paper circuit ornaments to give out at my extended family's massive Christmas celebration. @MichaelSobolak and I developed a quick design of some LED integrated origami stars using this origami folding pattern. After folding the five pointed star, you'll find a little pocket in the middle. I originally thought this would be the ideal place to house the battery, but it became difficult to position the LED and the rest of the circuit in such a crowded space. After trying a few materials that might insulate the LED from the battery below it, we decided to simply place the coin cell on the outside of the star, securing it with scotch tape. If I were teaching this in a classroom, it would be a super fun to let students try various materials to test for insulation within the star! Here, I decided that it would also be helpful for the battery to remain on the outside in case the happy family wanted to remove them for any reason.
Another interesting challenge that I faced was that our giant treasure chest of multicolored LEDs was in another state, and I felt silly ordering another 100 for this project. Instead, I found an old string of Christmas lights that had some faulty wiring (but still working LEDs!) Just using a pair of pliers, I harvested the old diodes (some of them a little rusty, but still in good shape).
Once we had all of the supplies and an army of origami stars, it was time to start building! Two little cuts provide a pathway for the copper tape to run from the inside to the outside. This required a couple small pieces of tape and some patience, but layering the copper tape over itself at the turning points helped ensure solid connections. Some of the rusty legs on the LEDs made it difficult to tell by sight which was positive or negative, so we had to double check before attaching them with copper tape. Another snag was trying to create a switch on the back; the clever solution is to leave some of the paper on the copper tape, then fold a length of the tape back onto this paper strip, bending the connection so that it doesn't trigger automatically.
Although these little ornaments might not be the most durable, they were a great shareable for the family! Some of my little cousins had never seen copper tape before, but by the end of the night, they could remove the battery, fix the switch and put the battery back in themselves. I passed them out with a quick warning to remove the battery if they go into storage, to prevent them from accidentally triggering and draining the battery before next holidays. Next year, my little cousins might just be old enough to join in the making!
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