This week will be a dreadful and lonely week of self-quarantine. My bedroom has now become an electronics lab and I have to say, I strongly prefer working at the Makerslab. Neither the soldering fumes in my poorly ventilated burrow, or the lack of physical activity are beneficial for my health. I have started a diary and hope to become the Anne Frank of the COVID-19 epidemic. I expect that my house will be a museum too in about 50 years.
Now back to the assignment for this week:
<aside> 🔌 Make a digital sensor
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<aside> 🔌 Make an analog sensor
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<aside> 🙅 None of the components can visually stand out, and have to be part of a series.
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Since many stores are closed and we can't get tools and materials from school, we have to take the MacGyver approach, as Loes calls it.
<aside> 🖇 Make your own paperclip connectors. These are friendly to copper tape and paper (unlike crocodiles 🐊). You can unattach and reattach these any time you like, so you don't have to solder wires on every paper sensor.
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It's easier to solder when you wrap the wires around the paperclip.
I connected the wires to the paperclips by both wire wrapping and soldering. Normally you'd only do one of either, but since the connector would be moving around quite a lot I wanted to strengthen this fragile point. The ones done with solid core wire (as shown below) were were way easier to solder. The wires with multiple copper strands were very difficult to solder on the paperclip. This might have been because I didn't clean the surfaces first, and I didn't have any solder paste. I did have flux-core solder wire, which should have helped a little.
<aside> ➗ Add a voltage divider on your sensor (preferably out of sight). This way you can control the value of your analog sensor. Be sure to test which resistor value works well on a breadboard before soldering. The copper tape I used as a conductor, but it was not made to be un-soldered and re-soldered all the time.
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I soldered the resistor directly on the copper tape. For Wire diagram see "Potentiometer"
I genuinely thought the paper would burn if I soldered straight onto the copper tape (but did it anyway), but I did make sure to keep the heat applied to the paper as minimal as possible.
Are you bad at soldering? Are you sick of having to plug random LED's in your breadboard to check your connections? Are you a poor student? Are you unable to get your hands on a multimeter because the government closed your school for a month? I got you. You can make a continuity meter out of stuff you can find around your house or in your Arduino kit.
<aside> 💡 If the two ends of our device touch a conductive surface, the circuit closes and the LED will light up.
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To make this provisional tool, you'll have to go on a quest around your house to retrieve the following items:
The working device. I solder on a little marble slab. It's heat resistant and safer than my desk top.
Normally i'd use something more conventional to connect the battery to the wires, like a coin cell holder. I did not have one available at the moment, so I used paperclips to conduct the energy to the wires.
The poles on a coin cell battery are very close to each other. In order to not create a short circuit we have to isolate the paperclips in a way that we don't create a short circuit. To do this, I used some glittery scoubidou cords that were super cool in 2005, but a piece of tape will work just fine. I clipped the paperclips onto the battery. The positive side is the one with the + on it, and marked the paperclip connected to it with a red piece of cord.
I soldered wires onto the paperclips just like I did for making the paper connectors. As you can see in the first video, i've used jumper cables to extend the circuit.
