Recycled Glowing Jelly-Fish Hanging Light!

Hello! I'm a student at Eagle Valley Highschool, and in my STEM class, I was tasked with joining this contest for a project! I made a Jelly-Fish Lamp out of recycled materials around my house with an added circuit to make it GLOW!

TOOLS:

• 1 Helping hands tool
• 1 Soldering gun cleaning tool
• Wire strippers/cutters
• 1 Soldering gun
• 1 Soldering Stand
• Hot Glue Gun
• Scissors

MATERIALS:

• 1 Moutain dew soda bottle (Can be of any size)
• Hot glue Sticks
• Tissue paper
• 1 Blue wire (Positive)
• 1 White Wire (Negative)
• Some solder
• 1 Battery pack
• 1 Battery
• 1 Switch
• 1 Green LED
• 1 Blue LED
• Sewing thread (Can be of any color)

The first thing I did to get this project up and running was cut the soda bottle to appropriately form the desired Jelly-Fish shape. The tools I used for this step were just a pair of scissors.

I cut both the top and bottom of the soda bottle off which ultimately left me with three parts, the top, middle, and bottom. I used the middle portion as tentacles for my Jelly-Fish, I simply cut strands of plastic of any shape and thickness to make them.

Using the pieces of plastic we cut from the middle section of the bottom we are going to make tentacles! Tentacles can be any shape or size. I first glued normal strands of plastic to the bottle. (Straight Piceses) After I added as many of the straight pieces as I wanted I started to curl other pieces with the heat from the tip of a hot glue gun.

To do this you have to be very careful because hot glue guns are very hot! To curl the pieces I applied heat to the desired area and after a few seconds, you remove the hot glue gun and twirl the piece and hold it still for a couple of seconds, and boom! You have a curled tentacle.

I repeated this step as many times as I felt necessary. After I glued on the pieces as shown above until I felt like there were enough tentacles on my Jelly-Fish!

To make this Jelly-Fish actually hang, I attached some thread to the lid of the bottle.

I got my hands on some needles from my mom's sewing kit, and I heated them up. Onced heated I punctured the cap of the bottle. I kept the needle in there and tied the thread to the needle. Once the thread and the needle were in the designated area, I hot glued the top and the bottom on the cap to secure the thread and the needle.

After this, I sewed the cap on tight and made sure everything was secured and in place.

To ultimately make the Jelly-Fish look more Jelly-Fish-like, I added the bottom of the bottle to the top of the piece.

To thread the needle through the bottom piece I did the exact same thing, I heated the needle and then threaded the thread threw the hole, but this time no needle needed to stay in, I just needed the piece to be treated threw.

To make sure the piece wouldn't fall off for move around hot glued it to the cap of the bottle.

To finally finish our Jelly-Fish so that we can move on to making our circuit I decided the overall project would look much cleaner if I added a piece of tissue paper to the top of the bottle to hide all of the hot glue mess we made, and to make the piece overall look cleaner.

I cut out a piece of green tissue paper and measured it around the top of the bottle to make sure it fit, after I ensured it fit I crumpled up the tissue paper to give it a cooler effect. I then put it back on top of the bottle and easily hot-glued the tissue paper. I only did one layer so that the piece still remained semi-translucent, and so the LED light we would later add would still show up.

To start off I put all the materials I would be using in front of me, including:

• 1 Battery pack
• 1 Battery
• 1 Switch
• 1 Green LED
• 1 Blue LED
• 1 Helping hands tool
• 1 Soldering gun cleaning tool
• Wire strippers/cutters
• 1 Soldering gun
• 1 Soldering Stand
• Some solder
• 1 Blue wire (Positive)
• 1 White Wire (Negative)

The first thing I did was differentiate what wires were going to be my negative and my positive, and whether I was going to make a series or parallel circuit. I decided on using white wires as my negative and blue wires as my positive, and also that I was going to make a series circuit as it is much easier and simpler to make.

Now that we have that out of our way we can now actually begin making our circuit.

The first thing I did was cut a piece of blue wire and strip it back a bit, just enough for me to make a small loop. Once I stripped back my wire I created a small loop with my wire cutters, and place the loop of the blue wire on the right side of my battery pack. Once my loop was on there I started to solder the wire onto the battery pack.

STEPS TO SOLDER:

-Plug in and turn on the soldering gun, and set the temperature to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

-Place the soldering gun on the stand as it heats.

-Once the soldering gun is hot enough, take it out of the stand and hold it in one hand, while holding a piece of solder in the other.

-Directly place solder into the space you want to solder together, then touch the tip of the gun to the solder and let the solder pool until it is in the desired space.

-After the use of the soldering gun make sure to dip it into the cleaning tool to get extra solder off.

-Let the area cool then repeat steps if needed to reach the desired effect.

After you complete the steps above to solder your positive wire to the battery pack we now repeat this step with our negative white wire! The only difference is we are placing the loop into the middle strand on the battery pack.

In this step, the first thing we do is cut and strip back some of the wire we have already attached in the step above. With this stripped-back piece, we once again form a loop with our wire cutters. We also get our first LED and loop the long side (Positive side). Then we attach these two loops together and once again solder them.

Then with our second LED light, we attach it to the same wire the other LED light is currently soldered onto. We loop it around the wire and repeat the soldering process.

Once we have done that we twist the short side of the LED lights (Negative side) together and loop them both around another piece of blue stripped-back wire. Then again we solder.

Now that we have our LED light soldered onto our circuit, all we need to do now is attach the switch to finish the circuit. Previously we added a white wire, we want to cut it back to the appropriate size then again strip it back with the wire cutters. We also do this with the blue strand of wire that we just added.

We now create a loop on both of the strip back sides of the wire and loop them onto the loops on the switch. It is important that one wire is in the middle loop or else the switch WON'T WORK.

Once looped into place we respect the soldering process two more times for each wire.

The finished product should look something like the final image presented above. Once you are complete finished make sure to test your circuit and add in your battery.

I added the circuit inside of the Jelly-Fish by making it so the switch stuck out and the battery of the circuit remained near the cap of the bottle. To make the circuit stay in place I added blobs of hot glue wherever I saw fit.

Enjoy! I had lots of fun and I hope you do too!