For the first week’s assignment, we had to build a flashlight. The definition of flashlight for this was something portable that emitted light.
Lucky (and unlucky) for me, I ran out of face cream last week, and had a great jar that I decided to repurpose for this assignment.
The materials I used (some, but not all shown below) were:
- Jar
- 3 volt battery (found in the junk shelf… woo!)
- 3 volt lightbulb
- 46Ω resistor
- switch button
- wires
- wood plug
I thought the process would be easy and quick… boy was I wrong. I can see now how buying extra materials is a must, and allocating enough time for these projects is a great thing too. I thought doing a wooden plug would be a nice way of aesthetically hiding the cables and the messy part of the flashlight, but after trying the drill press for two days, and ruining countless pieces of wood, I had to use the saw bed to cut the plug for my flashlight. It came out a little wobbly, but I polished it a bit on the sander and BOOM, plug done.
After that, I focused on building my circuit and making sure that it worked before doing anything else with the flashlight. I built it, soldered it and circuit done.
Lastly, I worked on opening the whole in the lid of the jar in order for the button to pop out. I couldn’t figure out how to do it and nobody could give me an answer on how to cleanly do it, so I ended up drilling holes in it until it worked. Success on opening the whole, but it ended up looking terrible in the process :/
I poked the button through it, sealed the gaps with the glue gun (which made it look even worse), but the flashlight was done! Gotta figure out a better way to finish things, but not too shabby for the first project.
Good work. Good repurpose of the jar. I’m curious why the hole saw didn’t create the wooden shape you wanted?
The button you chose is tough to use in an enclosure. It is designed to use on a breadboard or a circuit board. You would have better luck with a button that is a panel mount type.
Re hole saw: It kept getting stuck in the wood once I lowered the drill press. The first time it burned the wood (the piece I showed you) and the other couple of times it would just get stuck and stop spinning. I didn’t want to damage the machine and some shop staff suggested it might have been because of the missing middle pin. So I went for the saw instead, which worked out pretty well!
Re button: I’ll keep it in mind for next time. I guess it’s half knowing what to use, and the other half how to use it. Would there have been a way to cut the middle of the lid in a cleaner way instead of using the drill?