I made a machine imitating one of the dance moves. This guy can move his head sideways.
As you can see, it didn’t really work well and it looked like I am using my hand to move it. It is not really the case, it is in fact the glue keeps melting and therefore the solenoid gets stuck. Also, the spring used for solenoid is weak so it doesn’t pull back the core. In the video, I am pulling the solenoid to aid the spring.
The difficult part of this work is that the power source needed to be larger than what arduino can provide. Here is how the breadboard looks like.
Transistor (?) was needed to connect to the stronger power source and I had difficulty figuring out how to create the circuit. I learnt from Mateo’s circuit and was able to make it.
The coding part was easy. There is nothing much to explain.
void setup() {
// put your setup code here, to run once:
pinMode(8, OUTPUT);
}
void loop() {
// put your main code here, to run repeatedly:
digitalWrite(8, HIGH);
delay(300);
digitalWrite(8, LOW);
delay(300);
}
To further improve this machine, I could vary the speed of the head going sideways, by using variable resistor (and some difficult coding). Also, switch can be introduced.