Just an Empty Box

You walk up to a colourful looking closed box on top of a table. Curiosity gets to you so you walk up and open it. Then you will just regret ever noticing it as a large John Cana cut-out twirls as his famous theme song plays and led strips light up.

Today I will be explaining how I created this "empty box".

Here is the materials that are necessary to ruin somebody's mood with your very own John Cena music box.

-a large cardboard box

-several alligator clip wires

-2 large john cenas printed

- extra cardboard

-scratch (computer program)

- 9 volt battery

-LED lights

-copper wire

-colourful paper

-conductive tape

-tape

-scissors

-hot glue

-makey makey machine

-small motor

First you need to make the basis of this dead meme by commencing this incredible creation.

-Take the motor and get a nice cardboard piece that would fit well inside the bottom of the box. Cut a small hole to place the motor in and glue it tight. Then place it in the bottom of the box with the motor attached. Cut out a tiny hole in the side of the box to make the wires that are pre-attached to the motor come out.

-Next take your print out John Cenas and cut them out. Then glue the blank pieces of paper to both sides of a similar sized piece of cardboard. Then use whatever you would like (I used a gear of Kinects) to stick in the cardboard and glue tight. The result should be that your John Cena will eventually spin when the motor does.

• First you need to build yourself a lid to the box. Use hinges, or copper wire to make somewhat of a lift Delete repeated word flap on top of John Cena. Firmly attach a battery to the side of the lid. It is important that the battery is on the same side as the wires sticking out of your box.
• So now you need to take the wires connected to the motor (the ones sticking out) and connect them to copper wire. Make sure they do not cross or it will not work. Make the left wire attach to the battery by using alligator clip wires. The one on the right, you need to make a switch of some sort. I made a loop that was attached to the lid and it was around the right wire, but not touching. It has to be connected to the battery to have a charge. It is positioned so that when the lid is lifted up, it lifts that piece of copper wire enough to touch the right piece of wire which will complete the circuit! When the circuit is completed, it provides power to the motor making John Cena spin. Therefore when you life the lid, John Cena spins.

So now that it spins, it seems amazing. But spinning gets boring after a while so I think it's time to put some lights on this baby.

• What you have to do first is surround the bottom in LED strips. Just a long line around the inside of the box will do quite nicely.
• There is a positive side and a negative side to the LED's. They are small pieces of metal that provide the power. One side + and the other -. You need to attach alligator clip wires to each of those, and then connect them to your pre-built circuit. Hooking it up to the same switch as the motor is the most convenient thing. Just hook one side up to the left side of copper wire and the other one to the right. If at first it doesn't work, flip them. Again make sure that these two sides of copper wire never cross each other or else the circuit will not run.

So how good is John Cena without his theme song? The memes never would have come. So we need to use the makey makey device to do this. All you need to do in this step is hook up the makey makey.

• First attach the device to the side of the box that all the wires and action is.
• Take two alligator clip wires. Attach 1 to the space metal piece, and another one to the bottom metal strip of the makey makey.

• On the corner of the lid and box, place two tiny pieces of cardboard, so that when the lid closes they will touch. Glue them on and cover both not glued sides in conductive tape. All you need to do is connect one wire to the piece of tape on the lid and the other wire to the piece of tape on the box. This will make it so that if the lid is closed, that circuit is complete, as if the space bar is being pressed.

Yes I know. Programming is difficult. That is what I'm here for! I have already done the programming for you. All you need to do is get John Cena's themesong off of youtube and download it into an mp3 file using this site:

http://www.youtube-mp3.org/

Next go onto the online program scratch, and put this sequence onto scratch. Easy! Then take the USB cord that goes with the makey makey and plug it into both your computer, and the makey makey. Then all you have to do is click the green flag to run the program! When the tape is not touching/lid is open, the theme music will play.

Now if you think wires look pretty I'm going to have to politely disagree. You don't want a bunch of wires hanging off the side of your box! That's gross. You can do many things to hide them but what I did, was I took cardboard and extended the box a few inches. This allowed me to literally hide the wires by building a box around them. Then you also would want to hide that big battery too wouldn't you? I did it by doing the same thing. Building a miniature box on top of the battery. Using just cardboard!

Now you are practically done! All you need to do is take those coloured sheets of paper and glue/tape them so you hide your entire cardboard box. I left a small flap for the wires just in case anything needs to be fixed on the fly but it is at the back. I included the words on top "Just An Empty Box." Well it's true. You just can't see him!