Electric Tree

In engineering class, we made LEDs light up to make sure we understood what we would be doing with them in the future. First, we had to start out with one and then add more. My partner and I eventually got to three LEDs. That's where the chaos happened. We put our resistor in the wrong place causing one of the LEDs to pop in half and shock my hand. To say we learned our lesson is an understatement. Although this happened, that's what engineering is about- trial and error. Because of this incident, unfortunately we did not get a chance to get a picture of the three LEDs.

To build our Digital Trees, we first had to all work together to string wire around a chair leg. The colored wire we chose were red, green, and copper.

We strung and twisted our wire with a drill after all of our desired colors were wrapped around the chair leg.

Once the wire was twisted, we cut them into similar-sized pieces to eventually twist again to make the trunk of our individual trees.

The twisted wires created the base of our trunks starting the real challenge in this project.

Our next assignment was to mend the branches how we wanted them. The time lapse may look short, but it was actually a time lapse in the span of the whole class period. I just couldn't get it how I wanted it. Luckily, I found a design that I liked later on and stuck with it. (Not included in the timelapse)

Using wire strippers, we stripped the red and black wire inside a USB cable. From there, we used a soldering iron to attach the desired wires to the desired "roots" of our trees.

You will see in the time lapse that I kept walking away. We were soldering on LEDs to our trees, but before we could solder them on, we had to plug the USB cable into a computer and test the LEDs to make sure that they would light up.

Overall, this project created a productive expirence to learn about LEDs and wires. Instead of combining past skills, we learned new skills to eventually use in the future. I think that this project would be useful to the future classes also.