Hurray! I finally found time to play with Circuit Stickers!
As much as I love the cuteness of the Circuit Sticker Sketchbook, I’m pretty stingy and wanted to use the stickers for a project in my own notebook instead. So I quickly sketched out a star pattern with pencil, to have as a guide for laying down copper tape. Because I wanted to light 5 LEDs, I needed to wire them in parallel, which is why there are two separate traces on the star. The inner trace is negative and the outer trace is positive.
From there, I wanted to play with the effects stickers, so I watched some of Jie Qi’s tutorial videos. I first tried to add a Twinkle sticker and another LED sticker in the middle of the big star, but space got way too tight. (You can see the random bits of copper tape leftover from experimenting with this configuration in the video.) But since I already had a star, I thought why not add a twinkling star next to it? The wiring here was a bit trickier because I had to cross the positive rail over the negative of the original big star in order to reach the blank part of the page. So I insulated with some Scotch tape to make sure the circuit isn’t shorting. Also because of where the negative and positive terminals of the Twinkle sticker are, I ended up having to run the signal wire past the two terminals under the sticker (again, insulating with some Scotch tape to make sure wires aren’t accidentally crossing).
End result? I love Circuit Stickers! I’m not convinced that they’re scalable for large groups of students – while not super expensive, they do cost more than just buying plain LEDs and batteries (obviously, since they have to be custom-made). But I would buy sets of these as gifts for kids in a heartbeat! Speaking of which, there is a Heartbeat sticker too….!