This one doesn’t really do anything useful. I call it the battery waster. Basically, its just abusing the solenoid by putting the battery contact in line with the actuator rod, so that when it turns off, the rod is pushed out by the spring, which causes the connection to be made and the rod to pull away. It’s sort of a primitive motor. It mostly moves in circles, however with some better weight balancing and a better material underneath, it has the potential to be good fun.
I’d almost day stick a capacitor in parallel with the coil wires, then you can change the oscillation rate. hmm, you used a scub pad so you sticking this in your sink to take care of those pesky 3 week old plates?
Here’s a thought, makezine had a mini cell/pager vibrator motor on a toothbrush head wonder if that could scale to a larger brush? or maybe use two of those heads and some kind of steering, you’d have yourself a vibrator powered robot… okay, but to what end .. I have no idea.
Hey David,
Sorry I somehow missed your comment! I hadn’t thought of the potential for scrubbing plates, but it would be really funny :-).
Yeah, that bristlebot thing can cook. That’s actually where I started for the night- I was trying to think of a way to design a cam or something to reduce the force on the backwards part of the vibrator’s path, to see if I could improve the efficiency, and ended up with a solenoid and a sponge. Those things move really fast, though, and mine just slowly putts around in a circle. Yeah, its probably in need of a scaled up brush, but…