Paper Circuit Tips, Tricks, and Inspiration

We send basic directions with our cards and puppets and have full tutorials for the larger projects, but sometimes basic instructions aren’t enough for the vision you have, so we’ll add techniques to this page as we come up with them as well as a pile of inspiration.

Sanding LEDs

The white resistors in particular can be very directional, bright from the front with little light on the side. You can sand down the resistor to make the light more diffuse. We used 220 grit sand paper for this one.

Using Resistors

The puppet kit comes with resistors. Resistors reduce the flow of electricity going to the LED and make it dimmer. This is a great technique for animal eyes. The photo below shows no resistor, a 100 ohm resistor, and a 1000 ohm resistor. They’ll make a more or less obvious difference on different LEDs and from different angles.

Left to right: none, 100 ohm, 1000 ohm

Glowing from behind

Sometimes you don’t want to have s ingle point of light, but rather, a more general glow. You could simply just put your LED on the back of your puppet, but you can lose a lot of light that way. So I like to provide a back for it to reflect the light back towards the front.

Inspiration