First Prototype

Phew!... just in time :)

So this week was unexpectedly pretty busy. but a god busy, I still needed to finish some drawings for a course. But these drawings are drawings that take about 20 hours, so it demanded more from me than I expected. Hopefully I can show it next week :).

To finish up last week I tried our all of the things that are in the package that I got. So I experimented with the tilt sensor and also with the Servomotor. Finally I ended up hooking a light sensor to the servomotor to make it move to the amount of light that is registered. (quite similar to the LED that reacted to light.)

so here is a quick show:

The thing with this experiment was that the servomotor wasn't really easy to connect, since some connections slightly failed sometimes making it hard to find out if it really worked. But I figured it out and it ended up great :). A cool aspect of this set up was that when using the self timer of my camera (it was dark so I had to use a tripod and everything :)) it flashes a light on which the servomotor reacted on. So there was a cool interaction between my camera and the experiment. (To bad I don't have another camera which could have registered the whole thing :)). It was fun :) we all had great laughs :).

But today I decided I should do something with the small motor so I did a quick brainstorm to find out ways to use this motor, and then some ideas I could make into prototypes. The first one is "the Daygreeter" which is a small puppet that will greet the sun or day when it sees it :). The greeting will be some bowing movement that is generated by the motor.

The cool program aspect is the fact that I first want to let it calibrate the light sensor on a whole day, which means that I first need to find out how to do that. This is to find the values of the total dark to the time when the sun shines the fullest. And also to find out when the sun actually rises and goes down again. Another interesting aspect is that when something goes wrong and the Arduino resets it will lose it's values, so maybe there should be some kind of continuous calibration program that will make it work the whole time. We'll work that out :).

I already made a setup of the puppet and motor:

The interesting bit is that the motor slips on the cardboard wheel, which needs to be fastened better, maybe with an elastic band or something. I'll find it out :).

Any way, I need to go again :). hopefully it was an interesting post :) and see you next time!

Frank :)