The Tinkering Studio at the Exploratorium has a great post on making copper crowns with LEDs as a soldering practice project.
The circuit diagrams are wonderful, evoking possible shapes of the crown.
4 thoughts on “Tinkering Tiaras”
Comments are closed.
Interesting. It’s the first time I’ve seen something with merely wires, battery, and LED, without inclusion of or discussion about how/whether to use a resistor to keep the thing from blowing out the LED. In any case, it’s by far the most accessible complete beginner’s soldering project I’ve seen. I’ll be introducing the kids to this shortly. Right after I make sure I won’t immediately clobber the lights.
This is a variant on the “LED Throwie” circuit. We did some analysis of it a while ago which may put your mind at ease: Some thoughts on throwies.
Heh. My mind was fine, but I did wonder about the state of the LEDs… That’s a great article! It’s from some time before I discovered EMSL, so it looks like there’s a trove of stuff in the archives I should wander through. Excellent.
Did this at home today for 6 people ranging in age from 6 to 56; everyone was able to complete something, although most went for much more complicated designs. 3 useful notes: 1. Tell people to plan on using 3 LED’s at most to avoid 40 LED designs. 2. The concept of the circuit is hard for knitters to grasp, as everything touches everything. 3. Using large gauge aluminum wire is not as useful as you might want unless you have a spade tip high watt soldering iron. Pics to follow.