miniProject2

 miniProject2 - Lucky Cat

Kyungchan Lim and Lu Liu (University of Tennessee)

Overview

Lucky Cat that takes coins.

Materials and Parts

Parts	Description of the Part’s Role	Count
Arduino Nano	The main brain of our project controls the input from the sensor and output to the led matrix	1
Servo Motor	Function as an arm of the cat	1
Play dough`	To design a lucky cat	1
Short wires	Connecting between Arduino, input device, and output device	22
Breadboard	Base plate for connecting components	2

Design Ideas

1. In this project, we developed 18 designs.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/10q7xH4l83yFHoWOSMrrL_leqOIou58YQvdVhjuQUhEk/edit#heading=h.4jxj5vvg3lpt

Initially, we designed to build a circuit that uses playdough. However there is so much possible variation with the playdough, so we were looking for our final design instead of trying multiple designs. We found that lucky cat could be implemented with the playdough and having an idea of user-interaction as an input, we decided to use a coin to be a conductive material to be connected with.

In the end, we got a lucky cat that moves it's arm with a servo motor and it triggers power only when the circuit is connected to a coin.

Demonstration

video of the demonstration: https://youtu.be/pRLjdj5Pdhs

When a coin is positioned on the clip, it closes a circuit. We tested with multiple different coins (quarter, dime, nickel, and penny) and all of them works the same way. Our initial thought was they might be made with different conductive materials so some of the coins may not work however from our testing all four kinds of coins worked.

Steps on building a kit

1. Implement an Arduino kit to trigger the servo motor.

2. Connect a battery to work without a computer

3. Make a cat face with a playdough

4. Put the servo motor inside of the cat and connect an arm.

5. Route wires around the cat to make the position for the circuit connection.

Challenges

One of the main challenges is coming up with a design with a playdough. The playdough can be so many things, it was rather difficult to actually finalize our design.

Unlike our initial design thoughts, we didn't use the playdough to be a part of the circuit however it is still having an interaction with the user so the result is more satisfying.

Future Work Ideas

We need to improve our input area. As of now, we just put clips to connect the circuits and connect a coin. We want to design a table or board that can be connected to each side of the circuit and a coin can be placed in between to trigger the circuit.

Discussion

From this project, having multiple designs and actually prototyping them is very important. We initially set our material to be playdough however it can produce so much different variations of design, we need to decide which one would work the best for our case. Especially the playdough also has variations in conductivity with its shapes. So trying different shapes and designs was very important.

When deciding on a design, having some concrete design from the beginning would help as well. In our case, we collected as many examples of playdough as possible and tried to come up with an extension of the design from existing examples. However, that way it was difficult to come up with another variation. So other than just collecting multiple examples, having our own design is also important.

Inspirations

We wanted to focus our implementation on two parts:

1. Getting user input

2. Show sophisticated design with an interesting idea.

We achieved our goal with these inspirations. We implemented a coin-connecting circuit by trying to find an interactive user input. We designed a lucky cat with our playdough which is an interesting design.

Most of our examples are from Squish Circuits [2].

References

[1] Cat Time (Playdoh cat) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgemSQEnGWg&ab_channel=CreateWithMe-Shikha

[2] Squish Circuits https://squishycircuits.com/collections/projects