The setup for this project is fairly straightforward once you have the materials in hand. For this project, I used an Adafruit Circuit Playground as the battery, meaning that I also needed a power source to plug in the Playground and make the circuit work. For this exact design, I used 4 warm white LEDs and 3 Blue LEDs, though depending on the desired design you could less or more LEDs of varying colors.

Supplies

- ThreadBoard (Instructions to Make Your Own Here!)

- Adafruit Circuit Playground

- Conductive Thread

- LEDs (7 for this pattern)

- Small Magnets

Step 1: How It Works

You can see the separate power and ground busses on this schematic and how the power bus wraps around the entire board where the ground bus only does a small curve on the inner part of the circle. Each LED is connected to both the power and ground busses which is what allows the circuit to complete and the light to turn on. You will also notice however that some of the LEDs are connected to each bus by separate pieces of thread, while others sit directly on the bus. This largely has to do with where the LED was located in relation to the bus. It works just as well to put an anode or cathode directly on the bus as it does to connect them to the bus via a separate thread, and so if an LED was close enough to the bus to not require extra thread, this method of connecting the LED to the busses saved on the amount of material used. You'll also notice that the power and ground busses are not connected which is a mistake that I made in my first attempt in lying out the busses which you'll see in the following step. If the power and ground bus were to be connected, there would be an infinite amount of charge flowing through the circuit, thus shorting the circuit. By keeping the two buses separate this mitigates this problem and allows the circuit to be completed through the LEDs in the proper manner

Step 2: Creating Your Constellation

I chose to lay out my LEDs in a Big Dipper pattern because it is a simple and easily recognizable pattern, and also because it is important for nighttime navigation which is something that I grew up learning about. I utilized warm white LEDs for the body of the constellation and blue ones for the handle to provide contrast.

With this particular process, it was important to have the power side of the LED (the longer pin) facing towards the outside of the circle because that is where we will be running our power bus. After bending out the LED pins so that they would sit nicely on the ThreadBoard, I also bent the longer pin into a slight "L" shape so that it was easier to identify which side was the power input in case they got bumped.

The Playground is at the center of the board and has magnets holding it in place on the ThreadBoard. These magnets are placed over the 3 volt and opposite ground positions. This means that when we are creating our busses we will simply be able to stick the conductive thread to these magnets rather than having to run them through the holes on the Playground.

Step 3: Creating Your Power and Ground (The Right Way and the Wrong Way)

When I first set up my circuit I did it wrong, but sometimes the best way to learn is to mess up! When I first was using the conductive thread to create my busses, I used one continuous piece for both the power and ground and did not separate these two busses in any way. The problem with this is that it creates an infinite loop of current and shorts the circuit.

Luckily though this was an easy fix and because I was working on such a small scale there were no terrible explosion causing consequences. To fix this, I cut the conductive thread into two separate pieces, thus separating the two busses. The ground bus I ran from the ground port on the Playground in a small semicircle close to the center. Because all of my LEDs were on one side, it was easy to separate the two busses since I didn't have to worry about making a fully circular ground bus with a higher potential of overlap. The power bus is run from the 3 volt port on the Playground around the outside edge of the ThreadBoard (remember we have all of our power for the LEDs facing outwards!) This made it easy to seperate the two busses so that when it was time to connect all the LEDs there wasn't much concern about the two busses getting crossed.

Step 4: Bringing It to Life

Now that we've laid out the power and ground busses and have set up our LEDs so that they're facing in the correct direction in relation to these busses, bringing everything to life is as simple as laying down some thread. I used small sections of the conductive thread to connect the corresponding LED pegs to their respective busses. I had to do some shifting of which magnets some of the LED pegs were on so that I was careful to now short the circuit, and one by one each LED lit up as its connection to both the power and the ground was complete. Some of the LEDs were even close enough to the power or ground busses themselves to not require extra thread to complete the circuit. This worked just as well and cut down on the amount of thread used.

The end product is beautiful and was fun and easy to make. Especially as a beginner who previously knew nothing about circuits, this project helped me understand how circuits work and was easy to experiment with so that when there were mistakes they weren't frustrating to fix.