Spooky Card

One of the goals of taking this class was to put a little "theory" behind my "practice". In music ed there is a lot of published material under the umbrella of Theory & Practice. Well, in a "same page, different book" I was a little "practiced" in using circuits and LEDs but could do with a bit of theory to help figure out why some things worked and why other things did not.

I had an "A-Ha" moment when talking about parallel and series circuits and how I could experiment with the two different wiring methods to make this card work for my vision. But before I could finish, I needed to start!

Easy to sketch with a blank sheet of paper

I started laying out Some of the copper tape with a loose idea of stringing up a few LEDs along the way. It ended up looking sort of like this...

This is the "after" product with the required modifications in place to minimize the inconsistencies I had encountered in testing. As you can see, I have wired the LEDs in series. Also, I got frustrated putting tape and to maintain contact and ended up soldering the +- terminals to the copper tape.

                                      

This was the general shape that manifested itself as a result of my sketching. Maybe it is a little bit of a backwards design seeing where the LEDs ended up and making my card around it, but it seemed to work. 

Next I was inspired to "Increase my Challenge" by using some sort of switch. I had seen a youtube video using a microphone as a sound sensor switch... Maybe this is how the Artwork "Dandelions" by Jie Qi did it. Anywho, I rummaged around in my box-o-things and found what I thought was a microphone module for use with an Arduino. So I did what any electronic moonshiner would have done a duct taped an Arduino and breadboard to the back of the card. 

"Moonshine Electronics"

After adjusting the sensitivity of the microphone I started to get a device that sort of did what I wanted it to do some of the time! Blowing on the microphone creates quite a lot of input so I went with that in mind in order to weed out any ambient sounds that might trigger the switch.

A happy accident that happened to result is the "flickering" the lights make when the user blows on it. This might not be desirable for a winter holiday card but it does suit a Halloween themed card.

Here is the finished product: