This is my first post here and it’s going to be a bit lengthy I think. Hopefully someone will be able to help me out.
I’m in the process of building an infinity gauntlet for a Thanos cosplay and I’m looking to do something different with the LEDs that will light up the stones.
What I’m looking to do is attach the wires from the LEDs to 2 neodymium magnets and place this into the resin before it hardens, then on the gauntlet have another 2 magnets wires to a momentary button in the fingers tips and to the power block. My goal is to be able to have each stone light up when I push the momentary button and attach it to the gauntlet using the magnets but I’d also like to power the stones just using the power block for when I just have the gauntlet on display, I figure a 3 way toggle switch could be used for this.
The LEDs I plan to use have a forward voltage of 3v and forward current of 20mA so my plan was to use 2 AAA batteries with 1ohm resistors going to each LED.
Where I’m running into trouble and this is where my electronics knowledge starts to become fuzzy is how would I wire the magnets that would be in the gauntlet, there are six stones total so there would be a total of 12 magnets 6 + and 6 - so that when I put one stone on at a time and push the momentary button only that stone comes on and also so that when all stones are in the gauntlet and I change the toggle switch that they all light up?
Or is something like this not possible and I’m better off just sticking to a simple parallel circuit with the 6 LEDs?
Thank you for your time and look forward to any responses.
“Where I’m running into trouble and this is where my electronics knowledge starts to become fuzzy is how would I wire the magnets that would be in the gauntlet, there are six stones total so there would be a total of 12 magnets 6 + and 6 - so that when I put one stone on at a time and push the momentary button only that stone comes on and also so that when all stones are in the gauntlet and I change the toggle switch that they all light up?”
This should absolutely be do-able as neodymium magnets should be conductive, however, I do not recommend that you solder wires directly to them. I suggest that you use a magnetic wire and epoxy to adhere the wire to the magnet for wiring to your LEDs. Keep in mind that the magnets may have some resistance characteristics so measuring the magnets with a DMM before hand might let you get away with not using a current limiting resistor, however, there might be the problem when there is too much resistance. Just keep everything in parallel and you will be good.
I hope this helps. Let us know if you need anything else.
I think the contact resistance might be a problem and routing the power through the stones is probably an unnecessary complication. Instead, I’d design the switches to close when in the presence of the magnet embedded in the stones. In fact, there is an entire class of switches that already do this: [reed switches. There are tons of different ones to choose from. This project has very low power and proximity requirements so you’ll mostly be selecting for dimensions.