When trying to think of a nice birthday present for a friend I came up with one of these “useless machines” we both love the thought of.
So my final plan was: have a more complex, arduino controlled useless machine that is still programmable and runs of an easily removable USB power bank. This way the this becomes a 2-in-1 gift: the power bank and the actual mechanism.
My initial plan was to build two of these things – one as a prototype and a second cleaner, better version as the actual gift. So I ordered the parts I’d need twice and started designing in Fusion 360.
At first I wanted to make on 100% myself and just used those of other people as a reference. Well, that didn’t really work out, since after printing it out I realized it A: didn’t work and B: was way too big.
This is what my first version looked like. After starting to print it out I ditched that and revised my plan. Here is the body printed out:
So from then on I decided that I’d take an existing model and modifiy it to my needs. I ended up using this model from thingiverse:
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1258082
I remodeled the bottom plate of the box to suit my need and create a “hotplug” functionality with the power bank.
After assembling my first prototype of the top half and coding a basic switch function this happenend:
Sooooo I had to slightly adjust the code for it to work.
After putting together the a behaviour of the box I was happy with I printed a second batch of Parts and assembled it. The second version got a lot cleaner than the first one. I also glued in a little stretchable string to hold down the lid.
In the code I not only had a few “animations” it could randomly choose, but also a few idle “animations” when the switch doesn’t get pressed for some time.