Well, I have to say I’m impressed with myself. After struggling to come up with an idea for tomorrow’s new media assignment, I finally came up with something. The goal of the assignment was to take a piece of junk brought in by one of my classmates and turn it into a useful tool, with a different function than the original item. I picked up what looked like a wall light; it had double standard light bulb holders on the top and the bottom and it looked like it attached to a wall. Two trips to Home Depot and a couple swipes of my credit card later, this is what I came up with (click ’em and they get bigger):
It’s going to be some sort of children’s toy. Imagine a long PVC tube of some sort coming out from the top. It’s a 2-inch to 3-inch PVC adapter on top of that thing with a whole bunch of duct tape. Inside the top is a light switch (the kind that’s very sensitive to turn on), and in the bottom canister: instead of a regular standard light bulb, there’s a string of 10 white Christmas lights (’tis the season) and two AA batteries wrapped in a glob of electrical and duct tape. It’s not pretty on the inside, but it looks OK so far on the outside. I think a child would drop a golf ball down the long PVC tube and it would hit the switch, causing the light to turn on. Do it again, it turns off.
Hey, I’m not coming up with the next great children’s toy, I know. But I successfully made a circuit with two batteries, a switch, and a string of lights. I’m pretty proud of that. Quite the engineer I am.