Tooth brushes, vibro-motors, and batteries, oh my!
For Wednesday’s Open House, we made little Bristle-Bots. A Bristle-Bot is a little robot consisting of a vibrating motor–similar to one found in a pager or cell phone–taped to a tooth brush head, that runs around a table like a little rodent or insect. They’re really easy to make, a ton of fun to play with, and a great time to extend and hack.
The basic, smallest design:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPC-IC0RFo0
A larger motor needed two brush heads:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67zDMdlS2hk
The bigger motors tended to drain the batteries really quickly:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5qLKNw4v6Y
This was probably the best one, the builder actually soldered parts of it together. It now lives on in the “Trophy Case”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4Q1ezT_zds
Next time, we’ll be making Christmas decorations based on the MSP430 microcontroller.
Read about you guys on NPR. I have some computer hardware and other electronic bits and pieces I would love to donate to your group. Do you take donations?
Absolutely. We have open house meetings every Wednesday at 8pm, that’s probably the easiest way to get something to us. This Wednesday there will be only one or two people there because of the holiday, but the Wednesday after that (December 1st) will be back to our regularly scheduled programming.