There are several materials and steps involved in making a copper strip circuit.
Materials: Copper tape, battery, LED, paper, scissors, or utility knife
- To make a basic paper circuit, you need two copper foil tapes with a paper backing that you can peel off and try to make two parallel traces with a gap of about a centimeter between them, leaving some extra copper tape at the end of one of the traces that is not glued to the paper.
- Now take an LED and bend its two legs 90 degrees outward to make it easier to place it flat on the paper, place the LED between the two copper tapes, and then use transparent tape or copper tape to stick it to the existing two copper tape traces to make it conductive.
- Next, we need to use a coin cell battery and connect it to the circuit, we need to know that both the LED and the battery have polarity, which means they both have positive and negative poles. The positive terminal of the battery is usually represented by +, which makes it easy to identify. The positive terminal of the LED is usually represented by the longer leg, and we must make sure that the longer leg of the LED is connected to the positive terminal of the battery, otherwise, the LED will not light up. So when we connect the battery to the circuit, make sure that the positive terminal of the battery is connected to the longer leg of the LED's copper strip wire.
- Here we are putting some extra copper tape that is not glued to the paper as the positive terminal, and then I want to fold this copper tape up and connect it to the positive terminal of our battery so that our LED will light up.
By following these steps, you can create a very simple copper strip circuit. As you gain more experience, you can create more complex circuits with more components and techniques.
