Holiday Sweater
In the Fall of 2016, I was enrolled in a course called Physics by Inquiry. In this course, we focused a little bit more on light and optics and electricity. The final project for this course required making something using knowledge learned through the various activities done in class. We worked a lot with circuits and I decided I wanted to do something with electricity and building of a circuit. As the holidays were approaching, I thought how it would be so amazing to create my own "ugly Christmas sweater" with a light up feature.
In beginning the project, I was given a sweater that has a nice Christmas tree sewn onto the front and I wanted it to have some lights. Step 1 in this project making process was deciding what materials to use. I was given the option of using small sewable LED lights or the kind that are usually used for soldering. The sewable LED lights only came in one color so I chose to use the others. There was also pens with conducting ink, wires, and conducting thread. The thread was the best choice for this project due to the fact that it is more wearable as it is flexible, durable, and able to conduct. The sweater also needed a battery holder and I chose to use one with a switch to be able to easily turn the lights on and off.
Step 3 was connecting the two ends to a coin battery and checking if the setup worked. Initially, only 7 out of 10 LED lights would light up. My first thought was that I needed another battery. This did not do anything other than make the 7 LED lights brighter which makes sense due to increased voltage and current. In messing with the design, I flipped the ends that were touching the positive and negative terminals on the battery and saw that the 3 LED lights that would not light up were now on and the other 7 were now off. I realized that those three LED lights had their positive ends on the side where the other 7 had their negative end. To fix this, I simply turned those LED lights to have the negative ends on the same side as the others. At this point, I successfully made a sweater that had a Christmas tree with lights controlled by a switch.
To expand on this project, I could create a program to control for different light up patterns and also add more LED lights of different colors.
Step 2 was designing a working circuit. The first problem I encountered was finding a way to keep the conducting thread from touching the positive and the negative so that there would not be a short circuit. I learned that felt works well as an insulator and it was great for this project due to it being able to move with the clothing. To prevent a short, I had a bottom layer of conducting thread connecting one end of the LEDs and a top layer connecting all the other LED ends together. In drawing a circuit diagram, this made a parallel circuit which is preferred over a series configuration to allow for more current to pass through each LED. I also added a resistor in series to all of them due to LED lights having little resistance. (I learned resistors were needed after wearing out a battery.)
A project like this made learning the basics about electrical circuits engaging because I enjoy the holidays and I have always wanted a festive Christmas sweater. In this project, I was able to combine something that I am interested in with something that I was just learning to get a meaningful learning experience. Of course the process of arranging the lights was not perfect and it encouraged me to reach out to my professor and others for assistance. At the end of it all I was able to go home with an artifact that I could show to others and use to generate conversations about circuits. This shows how Maker can be great in education. This project allowed me to learn without having me complete a stack of worksheets and take a bunch of tests. Maker allows students to have an individualized learning experience that has the same end goal.