For my assignment I decided to make a pedal switch that can be operated by just one foot. Initially, I was trying to come up with something that would not require me to use any part of my body at all and instead rely on another object to turn the switch on and off. However, this meant that I would not be able to control the circuit and according to me a switch means something that gives me the power to start or stop the circuit. Therefore I started to find ideas for different parts of the body that can come in contact with each other and act as the switch. 

My initial idea was to make two bracelets with tin foil and attach wires to each so that when the two bracelets touch each other, the LED would light up. However, I was not sure if using my arms would count as part of the constraints given to us or not. So I came up with the idea of using something more intuitive as my switch rather than two foil bracelets — a pedal! 

I decided to use two flat surfaces attached to the circuit’s wires that would light up the LED when they come in contact with each other. To make it more intuitive and pedal-like, I decided to attach one part of the pedal to my shoe and the other part would be on the ground. Initially I had used a metal mesh as my ground pedal and attached the wire to a cardboard piece which would go on the shoe. In this version a major problem was that the mesh and the wire did not have a lot of space to come in contact with each other so the LED would not light up very easily. To solve this problem, I replaced the mesh with a cardboard piece that has copper tape on it and the wire from the circuit is attached to the tape. To increase the surface area for the pedal, I decided to use three pieces of copper tape and to make sure that all three are attached to the circuit, I cut out a large piece of plastic off of the wire and attached the wire to all the pieces of the copper tape. Further, to make sure that the part on the shoe has a lot of conductive material to make sure that the LED lights up no matter how the shoe lands on the pedal, I decided to roll up a lot of sculpting wire and tape it to the cardboard piece (see picture). Earlier I was facing the problem of landing at exactly the right spot for the circuit to be complete but I had solved that problem using these methods and no matter how the shoe lands on the pedal, the LED will light up. This is also a very intuitive movement that all of us are used to so I thought that it would be a good idea to use it as my switch as oppoed to other ideas that I had come up with.

Long piece of sculpting wire on the cardboard that goes on the shoe to increase surface area of conductive material on the pedal