Eyebrow Switch

For my handless switch, I decided to use my eyebrows. I took inspiration from the moustache switch we saw in class, but decided to use the fact that eyebrows get closer when furrowed to create a switch.

I took some longer pieces of cable than the ones that came in our packages (so they could reach all the way from the breadboard and the Arduino to my face), connected one end to the boards, and wrapped the other end in aluminium foil. I then proceeded to stick the rest of the foil using tape to the top of my brow, and the result is shown in the video below.

Eyebrow Switch

Although the result looks simple enough, I struggled to find a design for it. At first, I thought I’d just use cables with stripped ends instead of aluminium foil, but found that cables don’t tape to faces very well, particularly if they are connected elsewhere. Then, I had the idea to use a loose cable as the switch, so that whenever I moved my eyebrows, the stripped bits of the cables would touch and form a circuit. This idea, of course, also didn’t work. I then realized that the problem was that the area of contact between cables was quite small, so I turned to copper tape. However, since it was only conductive on one side, trying to find a contact point between two strips using just my eyebrows proved just as hard. It was then that I came upon aluminium foil, which proved easier to use, since all its area was conductive.

The circuit used is the same as seen in class, save for the fact that one of the connections (namely, the one between the Arduino’s 5V connector and the breadboard) was split to allow for the eyebrow switch.

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