Small Surprises

I made my small contributions to table 11 of which I am proud given the limited time and general confusion of the half-day in-conference hack/make activity under Sparkfun's educational leadership. site site site

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As lunch at our table was wrapping up it came time to choose a project. I raised the question. My thought was to build something with our kits that could take advantage of a half-dozen micro-bits working in unison. No takers. The idea that did stick was a solar triggered motorized chicken-coop door. Some folks present did raise chickens.

I had scoped out the construction supplies before joining the buffet line. One of our troup went to stock up. Then I thought: glue gun. We're going to need a glue gun. I joined the feeding frenzy at the supply table. Then with the last glue gun in hand I joined my colleague who showed me a small Amazon shipping box suggesting it could be the coop. Oh yeah, we're going to need a coop and it will need to look charming. My last grab was ten sheets of barn-red construction paper to enhance the cardboard box.

Construction began.

I built the door. Lite. Properly scaled. Operable by micro-servo motor. Made from hot-melt, popsicle sticks and construction paper.

I built the door motor assembly. One more popsicle stick glued to the nylon servo cam and globbed over with more glue to make sure it didn't slip. I thought this would be glued to one side of the door but my colleague discovered that it would fit better at mid-door and needed no adhesive because gravity alone did that job.

Our motor drive programming team hovered over the last working laptop. I returned from helping another table select the right code block for servo motor control. There were multiple to choose from and the choice wasn't obvious. Our team had looked up a sample online thus avoiding this confusion.

The trouble was that the motor still didn't move. I got more involved. Switching code blocks around hadn't helped. The software simulation showed a motor moving back and forth but our motor didn't move at all. Was it program? no. Circuit? no. Wiring?. no. Motor itself? no.

I suggested adding an LED at the motor control pin. This showed brightly when the motor was commanded one direction and dimly the other. Back and forth. Bright and dim. So the micro-bit and its program were working.

The only thing left was the wires. Red for power. Black for ground. White for data. Everything was right. I started moving wires anyway. I moved connections closer out of desperation. Then it started working.

It seems that on these particular prototyping boards the power and ground busses run for only half the length of the board. When all wires went to the same half it worked.

More assembly happened. A small crowd formed to watch. The computer was glued into place. And the chicken. Yes, we had a pipe-cleaner chicken glued to the roof of the coop.

Lots to like.

What I liked about this exercise is that everyone fell naturally into some form of helping that maybe had little to do with their specialities and everything to do with some little thing that they could do in the moment.

I brought some experience with a glue-gun and knowledge of how a microcontroller had to "talk to" a servo motor. Even knowing the word "servo" helped but that is it. The rest was just reaching for something that might work and giving it a try. That was the point of the exercise, I think.