Wobbly Woggly : Glowing Goggly Eyes That Last Forever

Wobbly Woggly Goggly Eye Trap : Bright Led April Fools Prank

Firstly, Cleanup your workspace. We'll be working with some fairly small components and a hot soldering iron. Any extra bits around will just get in the way or cause problems.


You need these parts:
- Googly / Woogly / Wobbly Eyes : self sticking goggly eyes

- Battery : 4xAA

- Battery Holder for 4xAA

- BuckToot 350mA Constant Current Led Driver 350ma : This protects the Led from drawing too much current and blowing itself up. I used one in a prior instructable as well. or constant another to build your own Super Simple Led Driver.

- BRIGHT 350mA Led 

- Wake On Shake : This adds a lot of functionality without much work. This will lie domant and consume very little power until it is moved. then the full power of the batteries will be released onto the Leds for crazy birghtness or any affect you conceive 

- Momentary Pushbutton Switch with Normally Closed position : This will allow us to turn off the wake and shake return it to a stand by position.  Here is a nice writeup to understand more: https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/switch-basics/all

- headers and a 10k resistor


Also handy:
- Box : anything ( the small red boxes from SparkFun work pretty tightly)


Tools you might need:
 - Soldering Iron
 - Wire Cutters
 - Wire Strippers
 - Glue : I used E6000. I'm sure hotglue could work in a pinch.

Happy April Fools Day !

1. Tape Led in place
2. tin leds and headers. there are plenty of instructables to help. 
3. holder headers in alignment to leds and reheat. this will reflow the solder and make a good electrical connection. the headers will get very hot, so don't hold the ones your soldering or use a your pliers.
4. hook led to your battery very momentarily to check the polarity and verify your soldering.

careful it gets HOT and BRIGHT. likely you just dropped it. aren't you glad you cleaned off your workbench?

take great care with your leds once their on the headers. they are quite fragile and easy to damage if the headers get pulled off. we'll address this in step 4.

Ok time to make some hole in your box/enclosure. 

Make the hole near the TOP of where the goggly eyes will rest. 

The light from the led will not pass through the pupil part very well, so we're going to have the led positioned above the pupil.

drill some holes. they needed be very big.

wearing your safety glasses? no? you got lucky this time. soon you will be blinded.

Now wer're starting to think about electricity. 


These Leds will be wired in parallel    (unless you have a 9-12v battery... which could be cool, but then you'll soon be writing your own instructable)

1. position leds
2. tape. be sure to take care with that solder joint and leave the top of the led exposed as well as the bottom of the headers
3. snip off some excess wire from the bucktoot.
4. strip and tin the wire and led headers
5. solder wires in place
6. tin heatsink pad of led (that the big one on the top.
7. solder some thick wire or copper to the heatshink pad. this is to distribute the heat away from the led
8. ensure this "heatsink" doesn't pull too hard on that led and the "heatsink" doesn't short the circuit.

ok, now you are ready to build up the electronic system upon the wake-on-shake;)

Checkout the circuit. If you don't fully understand what's going on maybe read the shake-on-wake documentation.

The wake pin controls the duration of how long this stays on. We (I) want it on indefinitely for my joke. this will be achieved by pulling the wake pin high . 

This pullup is disabled thereby allowing the shake on wake to sleep once the button is pressed.

1. add headers to the shake on wake
2. add wires to the switch. remember to use the normally closed position.
3. attach a battery and the wake on shake, bucktoot, and a led via a breadboard to test thing out
4. ensure you are able to wake the led and it sleeps again after 5sec (this 5 sec is configurable with some serial commands)
5. add the 10k resistor. between the vout and wake to watch the led stay on indefinitely. remove it to see it time out. again 5sec. the value of the resistor is pretty flexible but we really dont need much current so 10k is pretty standard. 
6. try adding the switch between the resistor and the wake pin. now the switch will turn it off. again. only after the 5sec. cool, huh?

start soldering it up to a protoboard. EMS has a great writeup if this is new for you

0. start with the bucktoot. solder it in place. leave the excess wire in place. we'll fold that over to make the connections to the other components
1. add the resistor between what will be vout and a new rail for the switch. solder it in place.
2. add the switch to what will be wake and to near the resistor. solder it in place.
3. if it all lined up right, the wake on shake should drop in. solder it in place
4. bend the pins and wires to match the rails.
5. add more solder.
6. time to test


almost there!

0. line up the piece so they fit the box.
1. trim the orange and green to fit, strip and tin.
2. solder the orange (positive) and green (ground) of the bucktoot to the led wires
3. glue the leds, and wires down to the lid. this will protect things while pieces are moving
4. test. test. test.
5. place the eyes
6. enjoy!! 
 

I hope you enjoyed all this. pleases leave comments and report your own finding and creations!

thanks!