If you need some electricity to run lights, there’s a lot of options from the things you’ll find around the home. In this video, Robert shows a simple Iron battery you can make from steel wool and brick cleaner.
You’ll need a carpenter’s pencil, a cup, some activated charcoal, and some paper for a separator. It uses brick cleaner but can also run-on bleach or vinegar. This battery can run for many hours. Join ten in series to run LED lights. Each cell is around 0.3 volts.
The battery has issues, be careful with brick cleaner and use ventilation as it produces hydrogen but works well as an emergency battery.
Have you ever wondered where creativity comes from? Or how it can be increased and improved? Have you ever seen a new breakthrough invention and thought ‘why didn’t I think of that?’
Have a watch and see this youtuber explain how he gets inspired to build new things. Robert explains a process of gaining new knowledge that you can apply to making inventions, building things that have never been made before, reusing things in unique ways to save loads of money and discovering unique solutions to old problems using new materials.
What is creativity?
The dictionary describes creativity as…
“the use of imagination or original ideas to create something; inventiveness”
Ideas for what to do in lock down
When you start exploring how things work and you are always thinking ‘how can this be applied to current problems?’ you soon realise there is no end to the things you can try. By the act of exploring, thinking and trying you’ll discover new knowledge. It’s in the doing that you’ll find this knowledge.
So many times I’ve had a good idea, a unique way of solving some problem and I asked a friend what they thought about the idea and they said “if that worked, somebody would have already thought about it and tried it and they would already have a patent on it”.
And yet I, still continue to discover new knowledge by exploring, thinking and trying. So many new materials and devices have been invented in the past 50 years. There is so much potential waiting to be explored by applying these new things to old problems and also to new problems that have arisen recently.
The aim of this book is to give a little of the background regarding the making of inks paints and conductive inks and to suggest some possible uses and further experiments for them when applied as thick films and to aid in the development of functional devices based on inks that can be made by the experimenter themselves in their own labs opening up the opportunity for the creation of new inks. [more]
