Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects and Activities for Dads and Kids to Share (9 page)

O
rigami is an artistic tradition dating back at least 1,300 years (and probably more), and while it’s steeped in the naturalistic aesthetic tradition of Japanese culture, it has held an appeal for geeks as well. Perhaps it’s because of the link to Japanese culture. After all, geeks have a passion for manga and mecha and all things ninja. Maybe geeks appreciate the balance of the technical and the artistic. Case in point, I was the “president” of the Origami Club in my high school, and all the members were my buddies from playing D&D and taking AP Physics.

So origami can be something really fun to share with our kids, especially when they are younger. It’s about the least expensive art/ craft you can try, and it involves enormous creativity and imagination. And if your kids balk at the idea that folding paper into animals can be cool, just tell them to think of it as making their own action figures, and promise you’ll act out Pokémon battles with them when they’re done.

But how can we make origami even geekier?

I was browsing the aisles at my local electronics warehouse one day, looking at parts and pieces, and I noticed a very interesting item called a CircuitWriter pen. If you remember those glitter pens that everyone loved to use in junior high school, this is the same idea. But the material is actually silver, in a suspension of acetone, resin, and a few other chemicals with big names. You can use the pen to draw basic electrical circuits or fix broken traces without having to etch or solder; its ink works just like the thin conductive material on a circuit board, and will conduct electricity.

That got me to thinking: What else could you draw on to make a circuit? What about paper? Could you draw a circuit on paper and, say, run an LED from a battery? And, if you could do that, what could you then do with the paper? All of which led me to this project.

This project will introduce you to the electronic origami concept—we’re going to keep it simple and build a box with an LED. If you’re creative with this idea, you could come up with faux tea lights for decoration, or even emergency lamps.

You can use a regular piece of 8.5-by-11-inch letter paper trimmed down to a square: Fold one corner over diagonally to the opposite edge, and then cut or use a straight-edge to remove the excess section of paper. This results in a fairly large box (about 4-inch square), so once you master the fold and the circuit drawing, you may want to scale down to smaller sizes, which will actually help the circuit—shorter electrical paths means less loss of power to resistance. You may also want to play with different types of paper to see which hold the current lines better. More absorbent papers may require thicker lines.

STEP 1:
Build your box, based on the instructions in the illustration. Use a straightedge to get good creases on your folds.

 

STEP 2:
We have to identify where the path of the circuit lines are going to go, and this will take a little careful tracing. Take a pencil and draw a small dot at the center of the inside bottom of your box to identify where the LED is going to sit. Now choose one of the corner sides of the box where the battery will slip in. You’ll notice there’s a pocket of paper on either side. Insert the tip of your pencil about halfway from the top of the corner and rub it around a bit to make marks on both sides of the paper in the folded pocket.

 

STEP 3:
Now come the electronics! Carefully unfold just the corner side of the box where the marks are by lifting the adjacent top flaps and expanding the folded-over pockets at the corner. Where you slipped your pencil in, you should now see two distinct marks on either side of a fold—when folded, they face each other. These will be the contact points for either side of the battery.

 

STEP 4:
Use the CircuitWriter pen to trace out the two circuit lines. At each of the contact points on the corner, draw a pea-size circle of the conductive ink, and then draw a line down to the floor and in toward the center. At a spot just to the side of the center, make a good pea-size circle of circuit material to end your line. These will be your positive and negative “wires.” They should not cross each other, but otherwise the path from the corner battery contact to the floor, where the LED will connect, is up to you. Just keep it relatively short.

 

STEP 5:
Let the page dry (use a hair dryer or fan for quicker drying). Check the lines for continuity and fix any thin spots. Once the page is completely dry, you can do a test run: Hold the LED with its leads touching the contact points in the middle of the page, and then take your battery and carefully fold it into the crease between the other two contacts. Make sure you have your positive battery side feeding to your positive LED lead. If all is right, you should see light.

 

STEP 6:
To finish it off, fold your corner back together.

 

STEP 7:
Looking inside the box, you can see the circuits you traced. Take your LED and, using a little tape, affix it to the center of the box with one lead on each contact. Where the circuit lines vanish into the corner folds, slip your CR2032 battery into the fold, positive side to the positive contact, and negative to negative. To get the battery to fit well in the pocket, you may need to use an X-Acto knife to slit the paper along the adjacent fold so you can then slip the battery in from the outside, under the top flap. Then you can hold it in place with a paper clip.

The LED will light up, and you have built your first piece of electronic origami!

This is just the start, though. The variety of origami patterns available on the Internet is nearly limitless. You can fold a dragon and make a flaming mouth with a red light! You can even make paper airplanes with working landing lights! Anything is possible when geeky parents and their geeky kids work together.