Created by : Alessandra and Ghalya

Inspired by the Game of Thrones opening with several castles slowly moving up from a flat plane through the spinning of an array of gears, we thought that we try just making one castle move up in a similar fashion.

The most difficult part of the design was making sure the paper castle could move up smoothly. This required several iterations of understanding where internal flaps and holders would be required to keep the structure stable.

For the actuation of moving the castle up vertically, we initially used a servo motor.

Finding that the servo was not strong enough to push through multiple layers of a castle, we turned to using a stepper motor.

The scripting for the stepper motor was relatively simple and similar to a servo with the exception if its ability to rotate 360 degrees (for this project we only needed 6/8 of a full rotation).  In terms of connection the stepper to the Arduino board, we did initially use a bridge and try to connect the motor.  However after a few failed attempts, we eventually just plugged it directly into the Arduino. Since a Nema17 stepper only needs 5V to run, it was able to work…..though probably not the best idea or method of powering a stepper.

</pre>
<div>#include <Stepper.h></div>
<div></div>
<div>const int stepsPerRevolution = 360;  // change this to fit the number of steps per revolution</div>
<div>// for your motor</div>
<div></div>
<div>// initialize the stepper library on pins 8 through 11:</div>
<div>Stepper myStepper(stepsPerRevolution, 8, 9, 10, 11);</div>
<div></div>
<div>void setup() {</div>
<div>  // set the speed at 60 rpm:</div>
<div>  myStepper.setSpeed(10);</div>
<div>  // initialize the serial port:</div>
<div>  Serial.begin(9600);</div>
<div>}</div>
<div></div>
<div>void loop() {</div>
<div>  // step one revolution  in one direction:</div>
<div>  Serial.println("clockwise");</div>
<div>  myStepper.step(-<wbr />stepsPerRevolution);</div>
<div></div>
<div></div>
<div>}</div>
<pre>

For a future iteration. We would look to take the movement of the gears to a third dimension and have horizontally facing gears help rotate multiple vertical gears.