I was in charge of making the mechanics of the button on the selfie stick.
- Strong scissors or X-Acto Knife
- Screen touchable gloves
Drill a hole at the end of the popsicle stick and the broomstick (of the selfie stick) that is slightly wider than the diameter of the Q-Tip stick.
Once the hole is drilled in, align the popsicle stick hole, with the broomstick hole and place the stick part of the Q-Tip in the hole (so then the cotton part is on the outside of the popsicle stick and the broomstick).
Put glue on where the stick and the broomstick touch, but make sure THE GLUE DOESN’T TOUCH THE POPSICLE STICK! If you get glue on the popsicle stick then the button won’t move. SO let the glue dry.
While waiting for the glue to dry, you can grab your wooden dowel, and measure the length you need it so that it’s slightly shorter than the broomstick. Cut the dowel to the desired length and then glue the other end of the popsicle sticks to the dowel. One end of the popsicle stick should be moveable and attached to the broomstick, and the other end is glued and not moveable to the dowel.
Now that you have your moving and dried dowel button, now we just attach a touchable glove to the end of the dowel. *Now this is where we ran into to trouble*
Where everything went wrong:
The reason I didn’t include pictures of my step is that we didn’t end up including this part of the project. The mechanics worked, but we couldn’t get the dowel to be touch screen sensitive. We tried a lot of different methods; 1. using a touchable glove, 2. end of a stylus pen, 3. Aluminum foil... NONE of the methods worked. We looked up other DIY stylus pen videos, but none of them worked on our wooden dowel. We realized, because of science we needed to use a conductive material in order for it to work (wood is not conductive). So we decided to not include this part, and instead of having a button press the camera button, you just set a timer. We suggest that if you did want to include some sort of button, maybe using some sort of metal rod (or any conductive material) instead of the wooden dowel. Although we couldn’t get this part to work, I think that the timer is an easier method, and lowers the cost of this whole project by a couple of bucks. I think that the dowel at the end of the day, would’ve been a bit too bulky, but also would’ve had to be detachable to be able to insert the selfie stick into the tripod. So in the end, I’m glad it didn’t work because it would’ve caused more problems in the future.