The re-designed cardboard stand, including notches at the bottom for a shelf to hold the motor.
Once those were printed and assembled, I was able to test the sculpture with my motor. I ran into some problems with friction -- at first, I had tightened the various axles and hinges of my sculpture too much, so the motor couldn't turn the gears at all. Next, the shelf I had made for the motor to sit in was causing friction and preventing the motor from turning. Once I fixed both of those problems, I found another issue, which was that I was having trouble fixing the center axle to the center gear on the far side, so the motor was only turning one side of the sculpture. I decided to leave that problem for another day, and focused on getting the motor to work with one side of the sculpture. Eventually, I succeeded, although I had to hold the motor in place:
It lives!
Now I could add in the Arduino part. I hooked up a simple circuit with my Arduino Uno, my motor, a motor controller, and a few wires, and wrote a simple program to supply power to the motor:
const int A1A = 3; // define pin 3 for A-1A
const int A1B = 5; // define pin 4 for A-1B
void setup() {
pinMode(A1A, OUTPUT); // specify these pins as outputs
pinMode(A1B, OUTPUT);
digitalWrite(A1A, LOW); // start with the motors off
digitalWrite(A1B, LOW);
}
void loop() {
// start the motor
digitalWrite(A1A, HIGH);
digitalWrite(A1B, LOW);
}
I figured out that I had to reverse the direction of the motor to make the panther's
running motion go the right way, so I flipped pin A1-B to do that and then also
added some delay functions to create a pattern of motion. Here's a video of the
result:
The panther running on a timed delay.
Lastly, I went back and added a potentiometer to my circuit to adjust the speed the panther runs at. The motor is still not held in place well, so if I were to come back to this design I would rethink the motor housing so it doesn't have to be held in place.
The final result (so far).