Hence my first project, building an old-school stick style trap. So, first try with the motor, I wanted to hook up some thread to the little holes in the attachment and see how far I could pull something with tension using a potentiometer and how that would work. I needed tension… Back to the drawing board! from just playing with the motor a bit, I realized it isn’t very strong, and doesn’t move very fast. A catapult goes from 0 to 180 functionally, and I could wire up a potentiometer to set the angle, and a button to make the motor go from 0 to whatever angle and fire.
My first thought – being a huge nerd – was to build a catapult using the motor. So, I thought, what the hell can I do with a motor that goes 180 degrees? Break an egg? Hammer something? Knock something over/out of place? Hmmmm… As I keep reading, making Arduino isn’t just about wiring things into a board, it’s about building a project around them. Servo motors – which rotate 180 degrees – immediately brought a bunch of ideas to mind. So with this in mind, I wanted to make a motor do something. Obviously that isn’t the point of Arduino, but upon first opening the box, I was reminded of having to build this machine at 16 – knowing nothing about building anything really – and wishing I had had Arduino components at the time to help out – especially motors! Funny story, we actually had to send someone’s older sister to a sex shop to pick up a vibrator because we needed to hack it’s motor to shake a rattle for the machine… It had to do something really simple, in a really complicated way – the nature of Rube Goldberg machines. For regionals, we were challenged to create this machine which had to have several different types of transfers of energy, mechanical, electrical, chemical etc.