Creativity with Switches

Pendulum Switch

I wanted to make a switch with a lot of dynamic motion. At the time, there was a steel ruler on my desk, which also happened to have a notch on one end. Using that ruler, some twine and weight I tried to make a pendulum that turns the switch on and off.

I used the steel ruler as a conductive surface, while the swinging pendulum would periodically push the steel ruler to complete the circuit.

The initial Seesaw Mechanism made with the ruler placed on an edge, weighted with twine and heavy object.

Simple circuit: The only component is an LED that lights up when the ruler completes the circuit.

Simple circuit: From below, we see an incomplete circuit with a breakage point where the conductive ruler can complete it.

The Pendulum Switch – periodically activated by swinging the object below.

Honestly, this didn’t work as well as I had hoped. It worked for a bit but copper tape isn’t great at maintaining continuity so the LED lighting was very spotty. I was hoping for more periodicity and if I wanted to improve it I’d use a fulcrum and counterweight for a bit more seesaw action.

Plinko Switches

This didn’t get anywhere near finished, as the wiring was a little hard to figure out and near-impossible to do with copper tape. This might get revitalized on a large scale at some point. =P

The idea was that as the plink disc drops, it completes a circuit with each pin it hits, thereby lighting up the LED above that column. I wanted to achieve it purely mechanically, but found it hard to prototype several incomplete parallel circuits with copper tape.