Intro to Engineering: Our Book Grows (30.4.12)

Today we worked on creating a sturdy base for our pop-up and decided once and for all to make more pages. If we can get it done in time, we ideally would like to create one page for each installment in the Harry Potter series, but at the moment decided that, in addition to our completed page shown below, Erin, Kelsey and I would each work on one page so that we will have at least four in the end.

Our completed page illustrates the final battle between Harry and Voldemort (7th Book) and uses LEDs to simulate the spells being cast my each wizard. You can see the unlit LEDs sticking out near the fold in the Hogwarts Castle. This is, however, only a prototype; we plan to cut each page using various colors of cardstock and add more illustration on each page.

Erin is working on a page with a basilisk (2nd Book) whose eyes light up and are controlled by a photo resistor such that the user of our pop-up can turn-off the basilisk's eyes with their finger. Kelsey is working on a hippogriff with movable wings (3rd Book) which will be a page focusing more on pop-up design/ paper engineering. My page will show Bellatrix with a movable arm so that she can touch her wand to her dark mark. On the other side of the page we will have a light-up dark mark in the sky.

Our entire book will be supported by a cardboard lid we found in the engineering lab. The flat top of the lid will have the pages fastened, and our circuits will pass through the lid to the back where we attached two breadboards to handle all our circuitry. I exacto-knifed a hole in the side so that our power supply can pass through the side (we chose to do this over attaching eight AA batteries, which is what would have been necessary to power our pop-up).

Shown below is our circuit with two red and green bicolor LEDs which we will attach to our Hogwarts pop-up in the final scene between Harry and Voldemort.