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Week 2: 13th February -26th of February 2020
This week we think about the definitions of making. Is it still making if you use kits and prefabricated materials? When do we consider outcomes original work? What are the benefits of returning to the basics of how materials can connect, and what does it mean to untoolkit a making process? We will explore the possibilities of conductive materials and basic laws of physics in a playful way, by creating paper circuits and soft DIY speakers. (bron: Brighspace)
Paper circuits GIF's, Ohm's law, schematic circuit
I haven't done this assignment at school but during the Corona virus at home. So I didn't have a coin cell battery at home and a piece of velostat, instead I used a normal battery (3x AA) and a piece of ESD foam for the sensor. I also couldn't measure the values of the circuit because I don't have a multimeter at home.
The circuit starts at the + of the battery, the current goes through the LED and then the 220 ohm resistor reduces the current flow and then the circuit ends at the - side of the battery. This was my setup for the paper circuit with the LED and 220 ohm resistor:
For this circuit I've used ESD foam for the pressure sensor instead of velostat to connect the 2 conductive traces. The harder you press on the sensor the more resistance flows through the circuit. Unfortunately it didn't work and i'm not exactly sure why. I've connected the LED's + on the right side and the trace was smooth (no rips in the tape). I also made sure that the copper tape was under the sensor.
Ohm's Law shows a relationship between the voltage (V/U) and the current (A/I) in an electrical circuit. The current passing through a resistor between two points is related to the voltage difference between two points, and are related to the resistance (R/ohm) between two points. It is important because with Ohm's Law you can control the amount of current in a circuit, adding resistors to reduce the current flow and taking them away to increase the amount of current.
The first paper circuit (standard):
The second paper circuit (sensor):
RISO Zine, a workmanship of risk/certainty
In this weeks' spread I am reflecting on my making process from last week. The reflection relates to a workmanship of risk/certainty from Cole & Perner-Wilson
Meet the maker: Introduce yourself
DIY Soft speaker. Documentation & coil design
Strip about 3cm of 4 female wires.
Put 2 of the 4 wires into the holes of the jack connector. Pull them from inside the hole to the outisde (see picture) so that it stays better.
Remember which color wire you put in which hole of the headphone jack. (In this case the white wire is put into GND (-) because it is the long part, and the green wire is put into SIGNAL (+) because it is the short part.
Put the ends of the two wires into + and - on the mono amp. (Depends which wire you put in which hole of the headphone jack).
Loosen the screws of the blue block and put it on the mono amp. Then, put the crocodile clips into the holes of the blue block, and tighten the screws (see picture). The black crocodile clip belongs to Ground officially.
To adjust the blue block on the mono amp you need to solder it. Turn the mono amp around and put wax on it. (See GIF).
After you put the wax on it you start soldering. First: Heat up the spot that you want to solder the tin on. In this case its on the circles from the mono amp. After that you bring the tin next to the solderering iron. When you think you have enough tin you put the tin away and leave the iron for a few seconds to let the tin flow. When you remove the iron you should have a pyramid of tin on the mono amp. (see GIF). (Loes helped me and Britt with soldering)
When you have soldered the blue block on the mono amp for the crocodile clips, you start soldering the black block where the 4 stripped wires need to go into. You use the same soldering technic.
After soldering the blocks on the mono amp you start soldering the 2 stripped wires into the holes of the headphone jack. (see GIF) It makes it easier to put the wires into clips like on the GIF.
After the soldering is finished you can start on designing! :D See my design below.
Because the design can only be one continious line I was first thinking of a sacred geometric pattern. But very soon I came to the conclusion that this design will be complicated to make because of the different patterns that have to connect and many rules that this style has. After making various sketches I was thinking about modern cubism. An art movement where I noticed that many lines and elements are connected with each other. Because it is so abstract it doesn't matter where the mouth or the eye is on a portret, which makes designing a coil pattern much easier; there are way less rules than with a sacred geometric design. My design is a portret of a singer that has a microphone attached to it, i thought this would be fitting with the speaker. The line starts at the microphone and finished in the eye but it does not close.
From sketch to illustrator
Coil design open line for vinyl cutter
Me and Britt measured the amount of Ohm from the speaker with a multimeter. Because the copper wire had some coating on it we had to burn the coating off on the ends where we had to put the pins on from the multimeter. We had some extra windings of copper wire on the back of our design to get some more resistance, it was also nice to put it on the back so that it wouldn't bother our design.
The design had 8 Ω, which is exactly what we needed to have to make some noise with it. The sound was not too loud, I think this is because we used a pretty thick background material which blocks the sound.
For my next iteration I would like to use other material and a different design to see if it the sound would be louder.
For the application I thought it would be a nice idea to have it in for example a magazine or in a newspaper. It would make good advertisement or just a nice way to hear the mornings' news.
I am very happy about the design. Athough I don't think the end result is very neat because it was hard to bend the wire exactly as I had designed on my laptop. I also don't like the look of the background material, also because it blocks the sound, I think. Overall I am happy that it is working and that it looks quite unique.
Savety Zine
Cover Safe Lab: Alles gaat op de illustratie in het makers lab mis, de lasersnijder en de soldeerbout staan in brand. De liniaal wordt als nagelvijl gebruikt en de computer is kapot.
When the design was created and the details were finished in Illustrator I printed out my design on paper. Because the copper wire is flexible we chose this as our conduction material so that we could follow the design easiliy. We taped the printed drawing to the background material (See photo). And after that we followed the design with the copper wire and taped that to the drawing so that it would stick to the background material. After the copper wire was taped on the design with tapes I started sewing the copper to the material. (See GIF)
When the copper wire was sewed on the background material I had to rip off the paper underneath the copper wire so that only the wire was on the background material. This was pretty hard to do because some sewing wire would untie and because of that the copper wire came off the background material and I had to sew it back on and the design got less neat because of that. Also, I cut the paper with scissors and I accidentely cut a copper wire (see photo). We had to solder this back so that the circuit was closed again. Luckily, we soldered the good parts to each other so we didn't had to solder it twice.
