INTERACTIVE WORLD MAP

week seven

For my final project, I wanted to develop an interactive world map for learning purposes for children. The idea behind it is that you have a map of Europe with LED lights on every country. If you touch a country with your finger, the LED lights up.

The Process:

In the beginning, I recreated a world map with Illustrator to have a vector file that can be variated in size. I marked every country with a red dot. This is where the LED should be.

In the next step, I had to think about the electronic circuit. I thought about where the LED should be connected and how to connect it with the battery.

This was really hard since I had to connect 36 LEDs with the circuit.

In the next step, I had to create the circuit. Therefore I printed the File that I made with Illustrator out and used copper tape to make the traces. Because of some issues with the size of the paper I had to redo this step and used the laser cutter to cut the map and the circuit into cardboard. I did the traces again.

In the next step, I cut the Europe map into an acrylic board and layed it over the circuit to check if it's the same size.

After this, I began with soldering of the copper tape and attached the LED to it.

I also had to think about the switch. How it would look like and how it should function.