This project is about using motion to express emotion. Here I chose the emotion of happiness, related to the motion of clapping hands. So here is my tiny robot “Pat”.
The main components of this setup are solenoids, potentiometer, and pushbutton. Here, the solenoids represents the hands; the button represents praising words; the potentiometer represents how flattered Pat is.
When Pat got praised (the button is pushed), he starts to clap his solenoid hands. If he is more flattered than normal (turn the potentiometer to one side), he will be happier and clap his hands faster; if he is not so flattered (turn the potentiometer to the other side), he will slow down the clapping speed back to normal.
If you want to create your clapping “Pat”, here is the code and sketch to help you:
Arduino Code File: Clapping Pat – Code
Fritzing Sketch: Clapping Pat – Sketch
I thought this project was exttremely cute! The incessant clapping definitely stimulated feelings of happiness and excitement. I felt the urge to clap with Pat and I don’t think there’s much more to expect from the project. The next step with this I think would be to make the hands respond to not a potentiometer but a different form of input. Like someone getting closer, or someone clapping around it, etc. I think also being able to control the speed and having actual hands on the solenoids would have been great. Great work!
Your clapping hands were definitely quite chipper/ did a good job of expressing happiness/positivity. Plus it was easy to grasp what you were trying to demonstrate with this project, and I really appreciated that level of clarity.
It seems like a common problem with solenoids is that they overheat/break when in constant use. Adding a dimension to the project that responds to over-stimuli could help compensate for that? (overall, your project didn’t have any conceptual flaws). I really liked it!