After graduation, though, you get the stuff people intended to keep but ended up not having room for. Books, paintings, art supplies, nerf guns, pottery, a cutting board, a stein, even a fully working external DVD-RW drive made it into my possession recently. But tonight the find I'm most proud of is a lantern.
This lantern.
I found it dumped in a (stolen) shopping cart outside the (locked) building that contained the "free stuff" box. A cool looking piece of camping equipment, with one issue.
It's broken.
The lantern is missing whatever control device (knob, switch) used to turn it on. But I figured with my extensive knowledge of electricity (I took AP physics in the eleventh grade), surely I could rehabilitate the device.
I did the obvious: I stripped away the insulation and connected those two wires.
Like this.
But, nothing happened. But that didn't necessarily mean my strategy was flawed; perhaps the issue was elsewhere. Dead batteries, perhaps? So I unscrewed the bottom to look at what I was dealing with.
D cell. Nuts.
I don't have any D batteries on hand, and I didn't feel like a trip to the store at night, right before a road trip, just to finish a project that was distracting me from the more pressing issue of "get things clean before the road trip." But all was not lost, because this lantern has an alternate power source:
DC-in!
Of course, I didn't scavenge the thing with an AC/DC adapter, but having examined all of the ones I have earlier today in an unrelated project, I knew that most of the ones of that size have 12V outputs. Since I didn't pay anything for the lantern, I decided to risk it, and plugged in the power source for one of my external hard drives.
Victory!
So if I securely fasten the wires together, I can turn the lantern on and off by installing and removing charged batteries.
Next step: wire in a switch, and it will be good as new.
Nico: 1.
Throw-away culture: 0.
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