Wire touches wire for LED

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ElMonstroPorFavor

Joined Apr 25, 2007
1
Hey ya'll. I'm taking a class on interactive sculpture that's sort of given me the push to tinker with electronics and microcontrollers like I've always wanted. Unfortunately, I've only been at this for a semester, so I've got a lot to learn. Hopefully I'll be lurking around for a while.

Anyway, me and my partner are stuck on our project. The class is geared more towards an artistic result than the technology behind it, so the professor doesn't mind if we do whatever we need to get the technology working. After all, he was stumped about how to accomplish this, and it took me about two weeks to get a stepper motor working, which he didn't know anything about.

Anyway, here's the deal
We're working on a pretty simple device: a headset with long naked wire "antennae" to be worn by the users in pitch black. When their antenna touches another's we want an LED to go off. While ideally it would stay on as long as the antennae touch (which could be brief in the pitch black), we'd settle for it to blink quickly in hopes to keep it simple.

Since it's wearable and hopefully inexpensive, we'll probably only be using a 9v battery and the LEDs won't be superbright or anything. All we're wondering is how we can get these wires to set off the LEDs.

I've racked my brain about this for a while and all we can come up with is if some wires are current and some are ground. That's not really what we want, but it'll work alright. I feel like this could be pretty simple, but googling and looking through textbooks hasn't really helped. Any ideas? Or is this not really possible for cheap or a small scale?

edit: maybe this is more of a homework help thing, but I don't know
 

thingmaker3

Joined May 16, 2005
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