A Wire With More Muscles Then Me

So this past semester I worked with nitinol wire. Nitinol wire or muscle wire, in simple terms, is a wire that uses electric current to create a shapes. There's much more this fancy wire can do, but for now I'll show you how I used it.

Here's the link to my final project for Fashionable Technology. You can see how I used it to simulate life/something growing in my final piece. It didn't come out as awesome as I wanted it to but it works for now.

Here is what you'll need to get started; 

TiP 120 transistor, diode 1 amp, 100 ohm resistor, copper tape and gator clamps. With these components you will make a circuit to help you control the nitinol wire for your project.  

TiPi 120 transistor

This is a close up of the soft circuit 

You will need a piece of wood or heavy paper, nothing conductive. You will need to solder down the transistor to the copper tape... I recommend soldering all the components down to the copper tape, but test the circuit before doing so. Sometimes things don't work right because somethings has burnt up or the copper tape isn't touch right.

The circuit all hooked up.

The red and black gator mouth clamps connect to a 9volt battery. Remember + to - using different colors clamps helps.

The finish circuit hooked up to nitinol wire and a battery.

The white and yellow clamps are hooked up to nitinol wire, the red and black the battery and the other white and green are connected to an Arduino Uno. The Arduino part is simple. Buy a starter kit for an Arduino  then download the open source Arduino software. Once installed open a new project and then go to example and open up the Blink sketch. This is the one you'll use to get started. Plug in a LED to the ground (GRD)/13 pin, a green wire to the 8 pin and another white to ground (GRD). Clamp the other white wire to GRD and the green clamp to the pin. {{ I hope that's not to confusing? }} Check the sketch for an mistakes (sometime you have to change the USB port) then load the sketch to the Arduino. 

Disregard the yellow wires.

What should happen is that the LED will blink and the nitinol wire will become straight and active. When the LED is not lite the wire returns to it original state. 

The following video demo the action of the wire when the LED blinks.

You can buy your own spool of wire here.

You can change the rate of the blinking LED by increasing or decreasing the HIGH/LOW delay in the void loop.

Here are links to some other amazing projects with nitinol:
High-Low Tech
The Very Hungry Caterpillar 
MAKE: Crafts
Jie Qi Projects

This is just one of many cool thing you can do with nitinol wire. I hope it's helpful.

Enjoy!