FYP: Lego - the best form of rapid prototyping

So Progressing on and actually starting the build of this hunk of technology I decided to tackle the servo first, as I had all the equipment all ready. So simple enough I hooked up the servo to the Arduino and managed to get it working fine with a couple of test values. Using some of the stuff I learned from Chris' and the IBM workshops I wrote a little sketch that connects to the web through my WiFi and subscribes to a topic on Chris' remote MQTT broker. It takes the values coming in from the topic and if they're integers and between the values of 0 and 170 it sends them to the server. I'm using a max value of 170 because my little ol' servo's a bit busted and struggles with values above 170. Using mqtt.io I sent some test values over and it after a little fiddling it worked.

The next step was to hook up the servo to a set of speakers. I attached a spoked attachment onto the servo, and then taped the attachment onto the volume control for my parents' PC.



I looked around to see what I could use to hold the servo steady. I taped a couple of bits and bobs together to try and sort it, but it was so shonky it just didn't work. I looked around again and I spotted a Lego brick. With a gleam in my eye I hunted around for more Lego parts for this to work, ending up with this:



It worked beautifully. I gave everything a final check and set the machine in motion. Below is a video of the functionality. The next step will be to set up acorn.siddv.net to have a volume slider, and set up a Node Red instance to connect Acorn up to the MQTT broker. 

Comments

  1. Tekk3y13 January 2014 at 21:38

    I agree with Dannyleo, this project looks really interesting, keep it up.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous1 August 2014 at 08:10

    Really good project! Keep on making stuff like this and you will get better and better.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Salma Jane3 April 2016 at 15:56

    Your blog is interesting because your ideas are both creative and functional. I'm looking to it for inspiration. Thanks for sharing!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Sidd5 June 2016 at 11:07

      Thanks for the nice words, really appreciate it!

      Delete

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