One of the hacks that particularly caught Digital Planet reporter Angela Saini's eye were some "LED Throwies" - a simple combination of an LED, a small battery and a small magnet that you can use to create a form of (removable) electrically powered light graffiti!
What are throwies?
Soundtrack to footage - Song: Heartbeats by Jose Gonzalez
One night to be confused
One night to speed up truth
We had a promise made
Four hands and then away
Both under influence
We had divine sense
To know what to say
Mind is a razor blade
To call for hands of above to lean on
Wouldn’t be good enough for me no
One night of magic rush
The start a simple touch
One night to push and scream
And then relief
Ten days of perfect tunes
The colours red and blue
We had a promise made
We were in love
To call for hands of above to lean on
Wouldn’t be good enough for me no
To call for hands of above to lean on
Wouldn’t be good enough
And you
You knew the hand of the devil
And you
Kept us awake with wolves' teeth
Sharing different heartbeats in one night
To call for hands of above to lean on
Wouldn't be good enough for me no
To call for hands of above to lean on
Wouldn't be good enough.
How can I make them?
Josh Lewis
Hi. My name’s Josh Lewis and today I’m going to show you the simple steps to making an LED Throwie. So check it out and I’ll show it to you now. Before I start though I should mention these aren’t my ideas, I’m just following some really brain-dead instructions on how this is done. They’re actually the idea of Graffiti Research Lab, which you can find out more about at graffitiresearchlab.com. So without further ado the instructions.
Okay, so let’s see what we’ve got here. We’ve got our instructions. You can see they’re pretty simple, Throwie pack of ten, which I purchased from graffitiresearchlab just today at the maker fair. I think they made a couple hundred of these. And so instruction one is grab a LED! So I’m just going to grab one out of my pile here, it’s a red one. Step two is tape to battery, and they’ve supplied all this stuff, so I’ve got one of the batteries they gave me here. This is what they’re using. It’s a Renown. I’m not sure is this Chinese? I don’t know, but anyway CR2032 is the type. It’s a three volt battery, lithium, anyhow.
So we’ve got this battery and it says long pin to positive. So I don’t know if you can see that, but one of these pins is longer than the other. So I just want to make sure that that’s on the positive side of this battery, which is this side here. So I just slide that, the battery right in between these two pins here, and bingo we have light. Okay. So now I’ve got to get a strip of tape, I’ve got one over here and I just tape that on like so. Okay. And now we’ve got a battery and an LED, all right.
So now the next step is tape a magnet to the battery positive. And they’ve actually given us a little stack of extremely strong magnets. These things are amazing. So I’ve got to prime one of these off of here, oh just finding some metal somewhere, okay. And that’s obviously going to stick to the positive side by itself. I need to tape it on there, so I get another piece of tape just wrap that on there. And there we go! So now the magnet is stuck on there. Okay.
Now the fourth step is throw! Now we get to see why this is called a Throwie. Okay. So here’s my Throwie, the fourth step is throw, so I’m just going to chuck it and it sticks just like that. So I’m just putting them on my fridge for now, but you can kind of put them wherever they might stick, anything that’s metal, anything that’ll take a magnet.
So that’s how to make a Throwie. It’s pretty simple and that’s all for today. Thanks for listening, bye.
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