You can purchase clones with the headers already soldered on if you search for them. Be careful buying clones — these appear to come from a warehouse in the U.S. so shipping is quite fast to the U.S. But be careful that you don’t buy them from a supplier who ships from China unless you or ok waiting for three to four weeks to get them delivered.
If you want to pay more and have the headers soldered on and no need to download a driver, go to the Arduino.cc site and purchase the original boards there.
Elenco is a great company to find larger breadboards, and all sorts of fun electronic stuff: http://amzn.to/2maSIun
Here’s a short video showing how to make a simple rotating head. It’s a silly little project, but it’s fun and it’s easy. If you’ve got kids interested in this stuff, it’s a great project to do with them. Or use it yourself to learn how to create and use a prototyping box of some kind (cardboard, plastic, metal), mounting and wiring a motor, and so on.
Maybe just be happy that you built a cute little toy — or get more sophisticated with the idea. You could cover the box completely with black and maybe mount and shine a little LED spotlight on the rotating head for a scary Halloween prop! (Similar to the LED spotlight on my swaying spider project. You could even add a motion-sensing switch to have it start when somebody comes near it.
You could expand on this even more and learn how to use an Arduino and a motor controller to make the head spin in both directions, or add a sound card and speaker to add some peculiar sounds!
Click the photos below to get the parts mentioned in the video.
A fun little project idea that tempts potential ‘victims’ with a blinking button that says, “Do NOT Press This Button!” When pressed, it sets off a siren and blinking LEDs. Let’s see who can resist!
I think it’s better to hide the cable that connects the button to the LED box. I just used what I had handy to cover the cable — two Christmas toys I had nearby. I would use something more appropriate if this was going to be anything more than a quick test setup. Wireless would be the best… maybe next time.
If you’re an Arduino fan, here’s a little side note about the LEDs. It was necessary to blink the LEDs using millis instead of delay so the button LED, the siren, and the different blink rates of the LEDs all worked at the same time.
There are lots of great reviews of this one on you to youtube. I’ve been dying to get into 3D printing for quite some time and I decided to take the plunge with this one. The most appealing thing to me was the price 🙂
Is it possible to get a reasonably good printer for $200?!
Well, I was foaming at the mouth in excitement to get this — two months later I’ve barely touched it. I’ve actually found a couple of better solutions than the parts I was going to print, and I’ve been keeping busy with other things. I hope I’ll use it more soon…
In my previous post I talked about using a motor, a cam, and a switch to fire a solenoid. That just wasn’t going to work because it was too hard to get the right pace of the solenoid firing. The motor voltage changed its speed, and it was too difficult to adjust the cam shape and to fire the solenoid properly.
In this post I’m showing how I used the Arduino Nano to control the firing rate of the solenoid instead of a rotating cam. With the Arduino, it’s a 30-second program change to adjust the rate of the solenoid firing as opposed to the ridiculously difficult process with motor and cams.
The video below shows the solenoid firing once per second by using the default settings in the sample ‘Blink’ program that is included with the Arduino. Then I made a simple program change in the Arduino to speed up the solenoid. This is soooo much easier than cams and motors!
Trying to find a way to mount things like motors, solenoids and switches is often a big challenge. Trying to find the right bracket, the right screws, and the right locations for those items in your experimental projects can be tough.
So I thought I’d show a few tips and tricks that I use.
First, my goal: I was trying to set up a little solenoid to bang against a miniature box to make a ‘chattering’ effect for a mini ‘monster in a box’ project, kind of like this Halloween monster in a box video (fast forward to about 1 min, 25 seconds to see the box chatter).
I started by experimenting with a little hobby motor. It wasn’t powerful enough to attach a cam straight away to rattle the box on its own so I had to find gears or levers, or something, to get some mechanical advantage.
The box in the video uses a cam attached to an electric drill, but I wanted something much smaller for my little project.
I started out using a cam to trigger a micro switch, which would energize a solenoid in rapid succession. (See my next post to see the solenoid fire.)
Instead of trying to find the right size and shape of a motor mount for my initial testing of things, I just used hot glue to secure some little blocks of wood to my test base (a 12″ square piece of press board). Then I put a little dab of hot glue on the motor and on the micro switch to secure them to the proper height of wood blocks.
Click on the photos to see larger versions.
Using blocks of wood is a fantastically simple way to make the right heights and locations. I was able to put away my box of sheet metal, tin snips, and other miscellaneous hard-to-use metal mounting hardware!
You can see my little blue cam that I also used hot glue for. I glued it to the motor shaft for a temporary attachment. Hitting the switch with the first cam — the brown pointy one you can see laying there — didn’t keep the switch activated long enough to fire the solenoid properly so I made the blue cam that kept the switch activated for about 5 times as long.The hot glue made it very easy to swap cams and re-glue.
The motor rotates at 300 to 600 RPM depending on the voltage applied (3 to 6 volts). That was way too fast with either cam, so I had to find another solution (see my post about using the Arduino instead of a motor). But the mounting techniques of wood blocks and hot glue have been a big headache-reliever for me over trying to find or fabricate metal mounts.
