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Electrical engineering
Course: Electrical engineering > Unit 7
Lesson 3: Spout Bot without Solder- The goal of Spout
- Parts list
- Tool list for Spout
- Tools and parts to build a Spout
- Connect the SPDT switches
- Attach the LED eyes
- Wire the SPDT switches
- Create the motor mounts
- Secure and wire the motors
- Install on/off switches
- Connect the LEDs to an on/off switch
- Attach Spout's antennae
- Add Spout's tail
- Give Spout some grippy feet
- Spout in a maze
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Create the motor mounts
Created by Karl Wendt.
Want to join the conversation?
- Can glue get into the motor vent holes?Will it cause the motor to overheat? 4:26(7 votes)
- Can you speed up the cooling process by sticking the hot glue in the freezer?(4 votes)
- It's important to go slow. Karl stresses this in a bunch of his videos.
Speed = mistakes.(4 votes)
- Could you use a 9-volt battery holder?(3 votes)
- I have a question not very relevant to the lesson, but when making a motor, is a fatter, shorter coil like the shape of a donut better that one that is longer and skinnier like a stick?(1 vote)
- Hello Trey,
That depends on the application.
As a rule, long skinny motors are built for high speed operation and fatter motors are built for slow speed. I'll give you a few examples using rotors from large AC generators.
Here is an example of a high speed (likely 3600 rpm) rotor. Very long and skinny:
http://www.sidewindersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/SidewinderLLC_Rotor_After.jpg
Here is an example of a comparable slow speed rotor:
http://imagevietnam.vnanet.vn/Upload//2013/2/4/4-2KT62BaoAnh422013101059677.jpg
Please leave a comment below if you would like to continue the conversation:
Regards,
APD(1 vote)
- where do you find all of these parts?(1 vote)
- How does the glue not leak into the motor holes when he glues them(0 votes)
- It's because hot glue is quite viscous, so it doesn't flow into small holes like that one.(0 votes)
- Atcan you change the place of the paperclip? 0:33(0 votes)
- Yes, it's up to you where you place them.(0 votes)
Video transcript
OK. So now we're going to
take a large paper clip and use it to make
mounts for our motors. The first thing we need to do is
straighten the paper clip out. We're going to remove all the
kinks and bumps in the paper clip as much as we
can with our hands. And then once we've gotten
those pretty much removed, we'll take our
needle-nose pliers and try and remove
the rest of the kinks, to get the paper clip
as straight as possible. So once we've gotten the
paper clip straightened out, we're going to bend it
at a 90-degree angle so that it fits snugly
against our switches. Once it's in place,
basically take your thumb and hold it against the paper
clip, and then just bend it. And we're using basically
our battery holder as a forming tool,
and we're bending it straight down and then
just a little bit forward. So, again, we'll put our
thumb right there on the edge and then we'll bend it down. And then we're going to bend
it just a little bit forward. And the reason
we're doing this, is that it's going to allow
us to adjust and fine tune the motors. We could just hot glue them onto
the side of the battery holder, but then if the motors were at
an angle that we didn't like, or they were at
different angles, we wouldn't be able
to adjust them. So this extra step
basically saves time later. In any case, we're just
double checking and making sure everything
fits, and we're going to make sure that the
contacts-- those gold contacts on the motor-- are out on top. We are going to hot
glue the paper clip to the other side of the motor. And right now, what
I did there was, I just put the motor
on the paper clip and basically just
tried to assess how long it needed to be. So it needs to be about
3/4 of an inch long and then we're going
to bend a little dog leg in the end of
the paper clip. And it's kind of hard to
get a grip on it there. So we'll cut the other one the
same length and, there we go. So you can use a
Nipper pliers or a lot of times needle-nose
pliers will have a cutting tool built into them. And so we want to
bring the paper clip out just a little
bit at an angle. So the motors are going to stick
out at an angle just a little bit there. We want those out at
about a 45-degree angle. They don't have to be
perfect because, again, we can adjust them later. So now we've got our
paper clip on our motor, and we want to make
sure that the paper clip holds the motor in place. And so in order to do that, I'm
just putting it back on here and trying to make
sure everything fits, and double checking to make
sure that we have enough paper clip on the backside
of the motor and that it's the
right length, and kind of getting a feel
for how the motor is going to fit
against that switch. Each of these are going
to be slightly different because everybody's different,
and the way they build it will be slightly different. But once we've got the
paper clip on the motor, it looks like that's
about the right length. In order to keep the motor from
rotating around the paper clip, we're going to bend the paper
clip at a 90-degree angle using our needle-nose pliers
just at the end. We'll put a little
dog leg in it. And so that will hold the motor. It'll keep it from wanting to
turn around the paper clip. Now we're going to put
our paper clip back on and make sure that the
motor is at the angle that we want it to be at. And it's not quite
at the right angle. So what we can do is just
grab our needle-nose pliers and turn it, and make it so
that the motor is lined up straight along the side
of the battery holder. And, again, this requires
a little bit of adjustment, but once you get it right,
it works pretty well. So there we go. That's about right. And, again, it doesn't
have to be perfect. Once the motor is on,
if for some reason it doesn't fit right, you
can always take the hot glue and peel it off, and try again. We also have an extra paper
clip in the kit in case you need to-- I will
always recommend, when you build your kits,
to have an extra paper clip, but the ones that
we're going to be using will have an extra
paper clip in them. So, if for some
reason it doesn't get made right the first time,
you can always change it. When we put down
the hot glue, we want to put down about an eighth
of an inch thick hot glue. So about an eighth of an
inch deep there on the motor and want to spread
it out very evenly, and want to make sure
that it is completely covering the paper clip. And it'll take a little
while for this to dry, but you can tell it's dry when
it turns from clear to sort of a milky color. OK. So that's dry now and that
motor is on there pretty good. And you want to make sure that
the hot glue is completely cool before you try and do any
fine-tuning adjustments. because, otherwise,
the paper clip may pull out of the
hot glue and then you'll have to do the
whole thing again. We're going to bend
this side the same way. Put a little dog leg in it. And then we're going to get
our motor and line it up, just like we did
on the other side. We'll flip it over. It's important to
remember that the contacts of the motor-- the gold-colored
or brass-colored contacts on the motor-- stick out,
and are not on the side that you're gluing
the paper clip to. So we're going to go ahead
and put that on there. And, again, you want to hold
this in the right orientation so that it stays in place,
and so that the hot glue is completely surrounding
the paper clip. It's easy to sort of
let it move around and then it won't
hold very well. OK. So the hot glue has cooled down. You can tell because it's,
again, that milky color. And now we're going to do
some fine-tuning adjustments of the paper clip to make sure
that our hot glue-- I should say that our motor mount--
is going to fit around our double-A battery holder. Now, because the hot
glue has a thickness, it will tend to push
out on the motors, and so you sometimes may
need to make some adjustments to that paper clip. We're going to use our
needle-nose pliers to make sure that the motors are lined up
the way we want them to be lined up, and that
everything fits snugly. Because we put that 90-degree
bend in the paper clip, we have some space
there that we can use to adjust, and make sure
that the motors fit snugly.