week 2

The assignment was to come up with a simple application for switches and LED circuits. Searching for ideas to try out, I came across this Mini Spin Art Machine; this machine will make endless colorful circles.

I gathered the materials : a Magnum box which I flipped, push button switch, 12V fan, 4 screws, 9V battery, a clear LED, 500Ohm resistor and some tape.

Here is the box:

and that’s after I attached the fan and added the push button:

BTW you might have noticed that I connected a 9V battery to power a 12V fan… That’s ok. The battery just powered the fan, but it wasn’t turning on it’s maximum capacity this time.

I wired the circuit at first using the breadboard and powered through the Arduino. It didn’t work when I connected it as described in  the schematics below:

When realising (with the help of my friend Aaron) that the resistor was also affecting the voltage going into the fan, I wired the circuit in parallel:

now I was ready for soldering it all together, trying my hands in soldering for the very first time (think I got addicted…).

That’s the only pic I took from behind the scenes, and it was before switching to a clear LED:

Success!! it worked.

The only problem was that the piece of paper kept on slipping away form my Mini Spin Art Machine! Danielle suggested to attach  a rounded piece of cardboard to the top of the fan.

and here we go: