Another of the vacation activities I planned for my nephew: making a vibrobot! When we were at the crafts store, we saw some Hex Bugs, and I told him about their forebears, the BristleBot. I realized that I probably had the stuff to make one, and could use my 3D printer to give it a cool design.
I found a simple car model on Thingiverse (thing 3554097), and modified it to include room for a button cell battery, two steel thumbtacks, and a small pager motor. I knew that it probably wouldn’t move forward all that well without any kind of directional components, but it was going to be made from twenty cents worth of 3D printed PLA and things I had sitting around, so I wasn’t too worried.
By soldering the tacks onto the ends of the pager motor’s wires, they can be used as large paddles to easily make contact. I decided to do it this way to allow the button cell battery to easily be slotted in and pulled out as a way of turning the vibrobot on and off. I’d considered wiring in an on/off switch, but ultimately decided to keep things simple.
This wasn’t Brady’s first time soldering (apparently there are high school classes that cover such things these days... huh), but it was still a little tricky, since tiny wires wrapped around a tack isn’t your typical soldering job. Using a bench magnifier made things significantly easier... and probably safer, too. The motor was mounted in the car using CA glue, and I used my 3D pen to melt a bunch of PLA on the soldered tacks to keep them in place.
As a final touch (well, more of an afterthought, really), we painted it with a combination of airbrushing and a small paint brush for the fine details.
So, does it work?
Whoo! It just kinda shuffles to its right, since it’s sitting on the tacks and they’re angled a little to the left, but it works about as well as I expected. Not bad for something we just threw together without much planning!
