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Electrical engineering
Spout antennae and tail
. Created by Karl Wendt.
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- What about the bottle caps? They are not mentioned anywhere! And can the LED eyes see or sense where they are going?(6 votes)
- Well, the bottle caps are minor details. No, the LEDs are not eyes, but lights. All they do is blink.(2 votes)
- Atminutes through the video you twist the LEDs together. 4:06
Do you twist the two long ones or the two short ones? Or a long one and a short one?(3 votes)- you do not want to connect the long leg with the shorter leg since it will not work. You can look at the video in which he explains which legs he connected.(1 vote)
- so this robot isn,t remote controlled how dose it turn when you are far(1 vote)
- the antennae,when they hit a wall,they make the circuit go backwards....(1 vote)
- i have made whole of the bot but its going round and round and not straight ....
can u please help me??(1 vote)- Well, there could be two reasons for this; one, the motors are not getting enough power and one is getting more than the other, and two, you could have different motor types that have different pulls on them.(3 votes)
- would you be able to make a casing for all of the wires to were you could turn on the switches and still have the antennas function correctly?(1 vote)
- well you could use the glue gun to case any wires that have the case and are not conducting into the beard as it would short circuit(2 votes)
- Do different gauge wires need different power? If so, how do you know which gauge wire to get for a specific type of project, from like building a car to building a tiny robot.(1 vote)
- That's a good question. This website tells you quite a lot about different sort of wires, but not so much about how to select the right type. http://www.edisontechcenter.org/wires.html
There are websites out there that will recommend different sorts of wire for different current strengths, but as they are mostly commercial sites. This site is educational, though. https://www.eol.ucar.edu/rtf/facilities/isff/LOCAL_access_only/Wire_Size.htm
Generally, for small low voltage batteries not generating a lot of current, like the ones you see in the video, only small gauge wires are used.(2 votes)
- Do you need a solder?
Because I don't have one(1 vote)- Yes. It is required to make connections with the wires.(1 vote)
- Do you have to add the LED lights?(1 vote)
- No, but I recommend doing so.(1 vote)
- Are the LEDs diffused or non-diffused?(1 vote)
- It is important to use paper clips for creating friction for the robot?(1 vote)
- The paper clip he uses for the tail is actually to reduce friction not increase it. Spout is a tripod. Two legs provide movement, and the third (the tail) is to get its butt off the ground. without the tail, the battery housing would drag on the ground which would be more friction, so it would slow Spout down.(1 vote)
Video transcript
Got some paper clips here. I'm going to bend them and make
them into antenna that we're going to use for the spout bot
so it can bounce into things. So it's good to keep one
part of the antenna straight, because that's how the hot
glue will sit well on the bot. So I'm going to go ahead and
put it right here like this. And so you can see that. And now we're just going
to do the same thing for the other side. This part takes a fair
amount of patience. It's OK if you spill a
little bit of the hot glue, because you can
cut it off later, but it is important to
hold that antenna still. All right. We can see it works. Our two antenna are in place. We may want to bend those
and shape them a little bit, but for now they'll do. So now let's go
ahead and connect our final connection, which
is the power for the LED eyes. And we're going to
use this switch here to turn that power on and off. It's kind of tricky,
because you don't want the loop of metal, the
loop of the wire, to be too big. Because if it is too big, then
it will touch the other side. But you don't also want
it to be too small. I think what I'm
going to do is just hot glue it down later like
I did the other one, too, because it's just coming apart. There we go. So we'll take this one,
put it in there like that, and then bend this
completely back so that it holds it in place. We'll take our third
arm here and see if we can get this to work. There we go. And I'm going to
go ahead and solder that one before we
do the other side. And that did not actually
have very much solder flow. I'm going have to
reheat this and see if we can get it to flow. There we go. That's how we want it to look. Now, you can see
the switch is on and the lights the eyes work. So turn it off, and we're going
to get our needle-nose here and see if we can't get
this all wrapped up. There we go. Now, we're going to put down
just a little bit of hot glue underneath it, right
here like that. And let that cool as
we hold it in place. And then we can put a lot
more glue on the backside around the wires. And that'll help
keep them in place, and also ultimately it'll
help hold the switch in place. And I'll wait until the glue
turns that sort of milky color, because that'll let
me know that it's dry. One other thing
we can do to make this a work a little better. Right now we can turn
it on, make it run. So it goes pretty
well right now. There are a couple
things we can do. One thing we can do is
we can-- turn it off-- we can take one
of the paper clips and bend it to make
a tail, so that it drags its tail on
the ground and makes it a little less
friction for it. So I'm going to take I
guess one of these here. We'll go through here like this. One of the things we can do is
just pop some of these things out. And then when we put
the battery back in, it should help to hold
the tail in place. You can also put some
heat-shrink tubing on the feet to get them to have
a little more grip. And so we're going to do that. I've got a little
tubing here like this. And you can use the heat gun, or
you can put your soldering iron next to the tubing, and it
should help to shrink it up.