Here's a video of how it went down.
Now that you know how the contest went down I'm gonna show my day to day of how I made my flashlight.
This flashlight contest started as whoever could make a small circuit that could turn on and off an LED with a switch since I had nothing the first day I decided to cut the wires that were available at the workshop and solder an LED to them.
I just rounded up the materials needed to make a fully functional circuit because I didn't have much time in class.
The only thing missing for my circuit was my switch, as a rule, the circuit couldn't be momentary it had to be permanent so I got this, also I stuck the 2 batteries together so I could get 3 volts of charge instead of 1.5.
I got all the parts together and I also got rid of the extra cables because they were unnecessary, as you can see I made it work with the switch.
Mr. G my intro to engineering teacher finally explained what would we would be doing with the circuit so he talked about a contest of building the lightest flashlight, he explained the rules and the parameters for the flashlight. Since Mr. G explained that the lightest flashlight wins I had to up my game my current flashlight or at least circuit weighed about 56 grams which were not good so I decided on changing my batteries because the batteries themselves weighed 32 grams.
The contest was getting really hard so I decided to get rid of the switch because it was too heavy to keep up with the others.
The problem with getting rid of the switch was that I had to make a new one that would actually be a lot lighter. Another thing I had to worry about with my flashlight was the box or the cover it had to have a cover with at least 5 sides so it could make a drop test of 5 feet at the end of the contest.
Here I just got very desperate and tried to make cases with everything I could find, clearly, nothing worked and I got a little stressed. That as you can see is a bottle cap.
Once again I thought I had done it, turns out I forgot the switch couldn't be a pressure switch it had to be permanent and also the cover or box couldn't take the form of the flashlight, those were the rules.
I can't believe what I found in my house one day, it was the solution to all my problems, I found some styrofoam in the kitchen and immediately I thought of making the case with styrofoam and the switch problem had come to an end, my dad was actually the one who gave me the idea of making a switch with to wires that would stick together.
My flashlight lights up when the two wires make contact, in case you were wondering. Since the contest is the lightest flashlight wins and not the brightest I weighed it and this was the result.
When I saw the 1 gram that my flashlight weighed I thought I had this in the bag and that I was gonna win the contest, the next day I found out that that scale wasn't working very well, turns out my flashlight was 3 grams which weren't enough to win so I had to do something about that. The only thing that was causing weight in my flashlight was my battery the only thing I could do was to buy a smaller battery.
The new flashlight I made was the same design the only changing factor was the battery. As you can see in the picture the flashlight is extremely small and light.
This is a photo of the flashlight actually working, this photo was taken the day before the contest in case you were wondering.
On the day of the contest, everybody was really excited and nervous at the same time, the fact that there were some news reporters taking pictures and stuff to each of the students with their flashlights was really nerve-wracking, the first thing I had to do was to do the drop test than I had to test it with the lux meter and finally, I had to gram it in the scale.
At the end of the day, I ended up winning the contest. Mr. G gave all the students some m&m's to celebrate everybody's success.
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