Use trained or untrained flexinol to add motion to paper or fabric. The theme for this assignment is open || closed.

Guidelines:
You must be able to turn it on with a handmade sensor (it can be one you have already created).
You can use Arduino or a 9 Volt (or LiPo) battery to activate your wire. (If you use only a battery, be sure to calculate the resistor needed)

This week i played with heat sensitive ink, my interaction with the material was trying to explore  the clarity of the hidden message to implement this technique in upcoming projects.

I attempted to make 3 different kinds of speakers using the same format for my project. I made these blocks on the tables saw to cut the grid like shape into the surfaces.

The first  (top left), I used conductive ink and painted it in a spiral pattern between each of the grooves. However, the ink was hard to manage and would bleed over into other paths making it difficult to keep from shorting my fuse. I tested this one and I’m not sure if it is shorting somewhere or it is too quiet to hear.

The second piece I made (bottom), was using copper tape. I spiraled it around using the grid blocks once, until I realized that I could make a second spiral along the opposite side of the channel. Theoretically this could function as 2 speakers but I only tested it as 1. This one does make a sound if you listen very closely, but not very good quality.

The last speaker I made (top right), I used conductive thread. I managed to wrap the thread once around each individual block on the grid before moving to the next one. To my surprise, when I tested this one, it made the loudest and most clear sounds of the three. However, It was still very quiet…

The wood that I used was 3/4 of an inch thick, which seemed a lot for a magnet to reach through, so to compensate for that I cut pockets in the center of each of the speakers to try and allow the magnets to get closer to the face. Unfortunately this only made them slightly more audible.

Although none of the speakers are not as loud as I’d hoped, I found the project to be interesting and learned that it is not so simple to make a speaker from wood, but they are kind of pretty! 😉

I decided to make a completely solid color for the thermochromic ink. I thought black was pretty nice when I did the swatch tests during class. I embroidered a pair of eyes that would appear when the circuit was turned on. Unfortunately I think my circuit is broken because nothing appeared. So I put the 9V battery directly to the embroidered pattern and I noticed that the thread quickly heated which caused to make just blotches on the paper. Perhaps I need to make the eyes bigger or maybe it would have worked better with the circuit.

This week for the reveal, I wanted to make a tiny smiley face appear in a big piece of black paper. For the paper, I used black pigment and transparency. Then, I sewed a tiny smiley face on a piece of felt paper. When I hooked up the circuit, you can gradually see a tiny face appear in the black paper.