“Foam” Finger

For this week’s assignment, we need to imitate a human gesture with servo motors. The first thing that comes to my mind is the motion that involves hands. At that time I could not find more motors, so I just used the one in my kit. The whole idea is to make a baseball foam  cardboard finger that swings from left to right and comes back to the initial position.

So I cut out from the cardboard the shape of a foam finger, slightly decorated it, and attached a stick on its back, which is taped to the servo’s spinning wing. Then I simply connected the servo to the breadboard, and added a switch to control the motion. I slightly adjusted the angle of the swinging motion so that the finger does not point directly downwards, which is depressing instead of cheering in a baseball game. Here’s a super short video about how it works:

The code looks like this:

#include <Servo.h>

Servo myServo;

int angle = 0;

void setup() {
  // put your setup code here, to run once:
  myServo.attach(9);
}

void loop() {
  // put your main code here, to run repeatedly:
  if (digitalRead(10) == HIGH) {
  for(angle = 0; angle <= 120; angle += 3){
    myServo.write(angle);
    delay(20);
     }
  for(angle = 120; angle >= 0; angle -= 3){
    myServo.write(angle);
    delay(20);
     }
  }
}

The thing is, the finger needs to be more colourful itself, and the motion involved should be more complicated and fun. I probably would add a pulse sensor to control the frequency of the swinging motor, or add another motor to add a pointing-forward gesture on the forefinger.