8 yellow LED’s

8 red LED’s

1 spool ~30 ft. wire

1 roll electrical tape

1 roll copper tape 

1 soldering gun

1 wire stripper

1 9V battery and battery wire cap

1 potentiometer

1. Take off the fabric- you won’t be needing it for this experiment. Determine that the metal umbrella frame will conduct using a multimeter, as the frame will act as your common ground for the circuitry. 

2. Solder the green LED’s to the ends of the articulating arms. Since the anode should face the direction of ground, solder the shorter end to the metal frame. The longer end, or the cathode, will attach to the wire. Do the same with the yellow LED’s and red LED’s, except solder them incrementally closer to the shaft of the umbrella. There should be three levels of lights, in to out, of red, yellow, and green.

3. Cut 8 lengths of wire that will run from the cathode of the green LED’s, up along the frame, and down to the sliding handle. Do the same for the 8 yellow and 8 red LED’s. It’s a good idea to cut them a little longer than needed, since you can always trim them when putting on the final touches.

4. Run each wire from an LED, down the frame, and straight to the sliding handle of the umbrella. This sliding handle will become the brush assembly later, and all the wires should feed into it. Tape the wires before and after the hinges so they can comfortably flex when the umbrella opens and closes, without much unnecessary movement. Strip and solder wires together at the end (in three clusters) for easier testability.

5. Wrap a stripped wire along the top of the umbrella, so that the 8 spokes can connect to each other. If they already do show a connection through a multimeter test, skip this step, though ours did not. This ground ring will act as the connection point for the battery and will join all 8 spokes in the circuit.

6. Time to test the LED’s- this is the early moment of truth. Grab your battery and connect the positive to each of the 3 wire clusters and the negative to your ground ring. CAUTION- there is no resistance yet to your 3 circuits, so don’t leave your connections closed for too long or else you’ll burn out your LED’s! If any of them burn out or don’t turn on, de-solder it and replace it with one that works. Now tape or hot glue the battery to the top.

7. Now that you have 24 working LED’s, you can add some resistance to the circuit. We used  a variable resistor, or a potentiometer, since we had different kinds of LED’s and also it looks kinda cool. Solder the negative terminal to the outside of one of the arms so that you can access the knob before using. Then solder the positive to the battery.

8. Now that you have the main elements of the circuit, it’s time to work on the unique switch mechanism. Run three pieces of copper tape along the shaft, parallel to each other. The three brushes will glide over these pieces of tape to complete the circuit. Red should run for about 10 inches at the bottom of the shaft, then connect laterally to yellow, which will run for another 10 inches, which will then connect to green at the top. Have the “green” tape run all the way to the top and solder it with a small wire to the ground ring. The schematic is illustrated below.

9. Now that you have the three copper tracks, your next step is to create the brushes. First, solder a hole through the plastic slider over each of your copper tracks. Don’t breathe these fumes, as they may or may not cause cancer (!) These will be your brush housings. Next, solder a balled up stripped wire to each of your wire clusters. These will be the brushes themselves. 

10. Tape the three brushes in their respective holes so that they have some pressure pushing them onto their copper tracks. This is the tricky part, since a lot of it is trial and error. If the copper tape gets too scratched up, replace it. If the brush wire gets too bent out of shape, you can replace that too. 

11. Test your new Sputnik satellite out! Go in a dark room, and set the potentiometer so that the LED’s don’t draw too much current. Pretend you’re a budding Soviet scientist in 1957, and slide your umbrella up and down! What a beautiful sight it is! Surely you will win the space race soon.