Make: Electronics by Charles Platt (classic books to read TXT) 📗

using an orbital sander that won’t make an obvious pattern. Sanding will make the acrylic translucent rather than transparent.

Drill a hole slightly larger than the LED in the back of the acrylic. Don’t drill all the way through the plastic. Remove all fragments and dust from the hole by blasting some compressed air into it, or by washing it if you don’t have an air compressor. After the cavity is completely dry, get some transparent silicone caulking or mix some clear five-minute epoxy and put a drop in the bottom of the hole. Then insert the LED, pushing it in so that it forces the epoxy to ooze around it, making a tight seal. See Figure 3-82.

Figure 3-82. This cross-sectional view shows a sheet of transparent acrylic in which a hole has been drilled part of the way from the back toward the front. Because a drill bit creates a hole with a conical shape at the bottom, and because the LED has rounded contours, transparent epoxy or silicone caulking can be injected into the hole before mounting the LED.

Try illuminating the LED, and sand the acrylic some more if necessary. Finally, you can decide whether to mount the circuit on the back of the acrylic, or whether you want to run a wire to it elsewhere.

Because the LED will flash at about the speed of a human heart while the person is resting, it may look as if it’s measuring your pulse, especially if you mount it on the center of your chest or in a strap around your wrist. If you enjoy hoaxing people, you can suggest that you’re in such amazingly good shape, your pulse rate remains constant even when you’re taking strenuous exercises.

To make a good-looking enclosure for the circuit, I can think of options ranging from embedding the whole thing in clear epoxy to finding a Victorian-style locket. I’ll leave you to consider alternatives, because this is a book about electronics rather than handicrafts.

However, I will address one final issue: how long will this gadget continue flashing?

If you check the following section “Essentials: Battery life,” you’ll find that a regular alkaline 9-volt battery should keep the LED flashing for about 50 hours.

ESSENTIALS

Battery life

Any time you finish a circuit that you intend to run from a battery, you’ll want to calculate the likely battery life. This is easily done, because manufacturers rate their batteries according to the “ampere hours” they can deliver. Keep the following in mind:

The abbreviation for amp-hours is Ah, sometimes printed as AH. Milliampere-hours are abbreviated mAh.

The rating of a battery in amp-hours is equal to the current, in amps, multiplied by the number of hours that the battery can deliver it.

Thus, in theory 1 amp-hour can mean 1 amp for 1 hour, or 0.1 amp for 10 hours, or 0.01 amp for 100 hours—and so on. In reality, it’s not as simple as this, because the chemicals inside a battery become depleted more quickly when you draw a heavy current, especially if the battery gets hot. You have to stay within limits that are appropriate to the size of the battery.

For instance, if a small battery is rated for 0.5 amp-hours, you can’t expect to draw 30 amperes from it for 1 minute. But you should be able to get 0.005 amps (i.e., 5 milliamps) for 100 hours without any trouble. Remember, though, that the voltage delivered by a battery will be greater than its rated voltage when the battery is fresh, and will diminish below its rated voltage while the battery is delivering power.

According to some test data that I trust (I think they are a little more realistic than the estimates supplied by battery manufacturers), here are some numbers for typical batteries:

Typical 9 volt alkaline battery: 0.3 amp-hours, while delivering 100 mA.

Typical AA size, 1.5-volt alkaline battery: 2.2 amp-hours, while delivering 100 mA.

Rechargeable nickel-metal hydride battery: about twice the endurance of a comparably sized alkaline battery.

Lithium battery: maybe three times the endurance of an alkaline battery.

Background

Maddened by measurement

Throughout most of this book, I’ve mostly used measurements in inches, although sometimes I’ve digressed into the metric system, as when referring to “5-mm LEDs.” This isn’t inconsistency on my part; it reflects the conflicted state of the electronics industry, where you’ll find inches and millimeters both in daily use, often in the very same data sheet.

The United States is the only major nation still using the old system of units that originated in England. (The other two holdouts are Liberia and Myanmar, according to the CIA’s World Factbook.) Still, the United States has led many advances in electronics, especially the development of silicon chips, which have contacts spaced 1/10 inch apart. These standards became firmly established, and show no sign of disappearing.

To complicate matters further, even in the United States, you can encounter two incompatible systems for expressing fractions of an inch. Drill bits, for instance, are measured in multiples of 1/64 inch, while metal thicknesses may be measured in decimals such as 0.06 inch (which is approximately 1/16 inch).

The metric system is not necessarily more rational than the U.S. system. Originally, when the metric system was formally introduced in 1875, the meter was defined as being 1/10,000,000 of the distance between the North Pole and the equator, along a line passing through Paris—a quixotic, Francocentric conceit. Since then, the meter has been redefined three times, in a series of efforts to achieve greater accuracy in scientific applications.

As for the usefulness of a 10-based system, moving a decimal point is certainly simpler than doing calculations in 64ths of an inch, but the only reason we count in tens is because we happen to have evolved with that number of digits on our hands. A 12-based system would really be more convenient, as numbers would be evenly divisible by 2 and 3.

As we’re stuck with the whimsical aspects of length measurement, I’ve created the charts in Figures 3-83 and 3-84 to assist you in going from one system to another. From