How to make conductive play dough.

Step 3: Circuit Ideas

Some provided on the website are: building a circuit with lights, using the conductive dough as a variable resistor, connecting buzzers, motors, LED's, basically anything that could use this to replace wire.  I will be posting more instructables soon on projects involving the play dough.  If you prefer to have the electronics in a kit, check the squishy circuits store.  Please rate, vote, subscribe, and leave comments!  

EDIT:  I will give a pro account to whoever comes up with the best idea to use this play dough for, so leave a comment and you can win a free pro membership!

Comments

[techxpert]

will the play dough heat up if the battery leads are connected directly to a thin strand ?

[jastreich]

The dough has pretty high resistance, so a short across it shouldn't cause too much heat...

[furrysalamander]

care to elaborate?

[techxpert]

great job!!! :)

[Ugifer]

This is excellent stuff!

I might well combine this with the "555 piano" circuit:

http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-make-an-electronic-piano-with-a-555-IC/

You could tape a wire to a spoon and make a "keyboard" out of dough. I guess you would make "fingers" for keys joined by a fairly thin bar at the top to give the resistance.

The resistance of the dough would probably be high enough to give a different pitch for each note! If not, just use less salt in the recipe.

I sometimes do simple projects with my 6-year old and some of her friends so we might make this one, I reckon.

[leegeorg07]

I assume changing the amount of Tartar sauce changes the resistance? If so, you could try make colour coded resistors using it somehow. Or show how you can substitute a group of resistors for one larger one. by colour coding them.

[furrysalamander]

It would work, I think, but a better way to do this would be to just change the way you have them connected. Short fat wires=Low resistance, Long skinny wires=High resistance

[leegeorg07]

I should have said, I mainly meant for teaching the resistor colour codes. *note to self, add context*

[ivanjacob]

you can use it to make sure firework doesnt fall down

[furrysalamander]

electrical uses

[suresh.gopikrishnan]

In case the batteries don't fit into the battery case that well, you can put the dough in there and make it fit snugly.