electromagnets, continued

(Sent these from the wrong address earlier and they didn't post, sorry!)

Tried out the electromagnet configuration I illustrated yesterday, with not particularly exciting results.  I was using a 9v battery hooked up to a small nail coiled with about 32g wire. I went with such a small scale because if this is going to be part of a garment, it has to be pretty discreet and lie flat easily.  Once I had the two ends of the wire attached to the leads of the battery, I tried to pick up some nails with them (it's like 5th grade science class all over again, I know). It worked the first time (that blurry thing hanging from the end of the coil-wrapped nail in the last picture is another nail) but didn't work again after that. I checked the battery, no problem there, exposed more of the wire (stripping off more insulation), tried different gauges of wire but still no luck.  I had some pupil sized magnets cut up and ready to test with but never got back to that point unfortunately.  I'm really not sure what the problem was. I'm just going to have to test with different size nails or other materials and different wire wrapping patterns I suppose. Failing that, I'll bug Joel Murphy some more. 

Once I do get this part figured out, the next step is diving into Arduino so I can figure out how to connect this to my eye-tracking setup. 

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