Faraday sees the light “But still try. For who knows what is possible” - Michael Faraday The story goes something like this. Michael Faraday, a blacksmith’s son hates his job but loves science. By sheer perseverance and a little bit of luck he ends up working in Sir Humphrey Davy’s lab where interesting experiments relating to electricity are being carried out. It is common knowledge at the time that an electrical current through a wire is able to move the magnetic head of a compass, and that the movement is occurs due to a “magnetic field” that somehow envelops the current-carrying wire.

What we will make Click here to play the above video Safety instructions This project uses magnets that are really strong. If you get the urge to put them in your mouth, this is not the experiment for you. Should you bring two magnets close by with a finger between them, some squishing is likely. The word to utter in such cases is a loud “OW!”. When the train is inside the coil, it will get hot - whether it moves or not.

Make a simple electromagnetic train Our physics would thus be no longer a collection of fragments on motion, on heat, on air, on light, on electricity, on magnetism, and who knows what else, but we would include the whole universe in one system. - Hans Christian Oersted The year is 1820. Hans Oersted is giving a lecture to a bunch of students, and during the class something odd happens - when he passes electricity through a wire, a compass lying next to it is deflected just momentarily.

Make a LED blink I would not take a second shock for the kingdom of France - Ewald Georg von Kleist A shocking discovery A capacitor is one of the basic building blocks of most electronics circuits. But what exactly is a capacitor, and how did it come to be? To answer that question, we need to get into our time machine and set the dial to…about 1650…that’s about 350 years ago!

Make an electromagnetic speaker There’s a way to do it better - find it. - Thomas Edison Switch off all the lights in the room and listen to Mozart’s K 448 Sonata for two pianos in D Major, and you cannot help but let out of a silent thank you to all the people who made that moment possible, because they wanted to understand and make things better than they were.

Make a time-lapse recorder Plants grow, we know that. But have you actually _seen one grow in front of your eyes? Me neither. So lets go about making a time lapse recorder. For this project you will need: A Raspberry Pi for the brains. A PiCamera A power bank battery (commonly used to charge phones) A coffee tin to hold it all together A driller (woohooo!!!) Some code to get it all going.

Make an insect robot Who doesn’t want to make one? It’s ultra-cheap to make, takes about 20 minutes to make and it moves just like a confused ant! This is also a great little project if you’re just getting started on soldering things together. Make an army of insect robots and get some exercise in soldering as well. But, let’s not just talk about, let’s make it! What we will make A simple insect robot that moves around “brainlessly” like this.

The world underneath This is the closeup of an onion. In fact, so up and close, that you can actually see the cells and the nucleus within each one of them. The above image is taken at an 800x magnification factor. Although the microscope used here did not have any USB support (high quality microscopes with USB support can be quite expensive!), with a little bit of DIY spirit we were able to take a picture using an iPhone pointed straight down the eye piece.

Solder something, anything! Just about every electronics project will need you to solder something. But if you have never soldered anything before, now is a great time to get started. So go get an old headphone that you no longer need… and snip it into two pieces. Gosh, it sure is broken now! (But we will fix it) Slice the rubber casing off each end and expose the wires inside. This is how mine looked — two thin blue wires and two copper coloured “ground wires”.

Testing an electromechanical relay A brand new set of electromechanical relays arrived yesterday. This is a quick guide on how to test a relay. First, a physical inspection of the relay. There are 5 pins underneath the body. The sketch below shows what each of the pins are meant for. The top row has three pins. The middle one is the common** (CO)** pin, and on either end are the ends of the electromagnet that sits inside relay.