Honorary Magazine 2018-19

Josh Schaefer &Matt Ward

The initial goal of our Honors contract was to create a work- ing circuit for a bike that would activate an LED turn-signal for riding at night. The contained circuit would connect a bat- tery to an accelerometer and an LED light.This would allow the light to turn on when the rider is turning left or right, indicat- ing to cars where they will be going. The circuit board layout itself would be printed out in ink on paper then applied to a copper plate.The toner-covered copper would then be placed into a ferric chloride solution, which dissolves the metal not covered in ink. After everything was etched out, we assembled the circuit board with all of the wiring and lights. Unfor- tunately the resulting board we created did not work, which we thought was because of a flaw

in the design, so we purchased a perfboard and electrical com- ponents. But alas it still did not seem to work, and after much research and problem solving we decided to stop the project after we had already invested so much time and money without a positive result. Even though we did tech- nically fail our initial goal, we learned something through the failure. We learned that failure isn’t necessarily something bad or that you have to walk away from. If we were to restart this project or go at it again in the future, we would know what not to do, or could tell others how not to go about it. It was Thomas Edison, inventor of the light bulb, who said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

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25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION