Resolving Roomate Issues

During my freshman year of college, I got along quite well with my roommate. However, if there was one thing we would fight over, it was who would have to get out of bed at night and turn the light switch off before we went to sleep. We had intense bouts of rock-paper-scissors and some insane bets that required way more effort than getting up and turning off the light switch, but it became a matter of pride to not turn off the light.

In the end, I caved and decided to build a system that would allow each of us to turn off the light from our beds, so we wouldn't fight over who had to get up.

CAD

My plan for turning off the light switch was to use a yardstick as a pivot. The yardstick would be placed near the bed. Turning it one way would turn the light on, turning it the other way would turn it off. It was able to do this because it utilized a dual string system, with one string on each end of the yardstick, that loosed one end when the other end got tightened.

To use this dual string system, I had to overcome several obstacles, height changes, and a wall orietation change. To accomplish this, I designed a pulley in CAD such that it could fit both strings and be mounted in any orientation. It was then 3D printed at our university's Makerspace and secured to the wall using command strips.

This completely resolved our roomate issues, until we started to fight over who would take out the trash.