This week I decided to make a penguin pom bot. I used a plastic cup, felt, eyes, and pom-poms to create my penguin. At first I was confused about how I was going to build the penguin’s feet but I decided to use orange pom-poms to create the feet. I attached servo motors to both the feet to get the motors to start rotating and for the penguin to start waddling. I decided to create a penguin because I thought about how two motors would move if put on the legs of a pom-bot and it was intuitive that the motors would waddle like a penguin. In my code, I first had both the motors rotating the same amount but later I changed one to rotate and twice the position in the for loop to get it to walk forward. For my iteration, I made the pom-bot look like a girl and made the movement of the pom-bot faster. My motor had stopped working the second time I came to the lab, so I had to switch out the motor as well. I removed the motor and pulled out the wires of the motor going through the back of the penguin out from the bottom.
Here is a video of my pom-bot moving after my iteration:
Reflection
This was one of those assignments where I did not think too hard about how I was going to use the materials to make my penguin but had a vision and was flexible with using the materials and try new things with the materials. I was very confused about how I was going to make the feet but then I just used pom-poms. There were a few things available and I learned to make the best of them in this asssigment. I wanted to make a penguin because penguins are cute when they waddle and in my head, I could see the motors making the penguin waddle. Previously, I had a plain looking penguin but I wanted to look more like a fun, girly penguin so I enjoyed making it prettier. I also tend to have the idea in my head that if something is damaged, it can take a long time to repair it like with my motor but it was rather easy to replace and reattach the motor in retrospect, so even though it seemed hard and time-consuming in my head, in reality, it wasn’t as hard or time-consuming I learned to understand. This was my favorite assignment and I am quite proud of how my penguin turned out. I had some idea about how I was going to make the penguin move so when I saw it move for the first time, I was very happy. Maybe if I had more time, it would have been interesting to see how the movement would have been made to be different if I changed the positions of the motors.
/* Sweep
by BARRAGAN <http://barraganstudio.com>
This example code is in the public domain.
modified 8 Nov 2013
by Scott Fitzgerald
http://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/Sweep
*/
#include <Servo.h>
Servo myservo; // create servo object to control a servo
Servo myservo1;
// twelve servo objects can be created on most boards
int pos = 0; // variable to store the servo position
void setup() {
myservo.attach(9); // attaches the servo on pin 9 to the servo object
myservo1.attach(10);
}
void loop() {
for (pos = 0; pos <= 180; pos += 1) { // goes from 0 degrees to 180 degrees
// in steps of 1 degree
myservo.write(pos);
if(pos<90)// tell servo to go to position in variable ‘pos’
myservo1.write(pos*2);
else
myservo1.write(180);
delay(10); // waits 15ms for the servo to reach the position
}
for (pos = 160; pos >= 70; pos -= 1) { // goes from 180 degrees to 0 degrees
myservo.write(pos);
if(pos<90)// tell servo to go to position in variable ‘pos’
myservo1.write(pos*2);
else
myservo1.write(180);
delay(10); // waits 15ms for the servo to reach the position
}
}