The Christmas Joy Spreading Machine

This is a project I built and showcase here. It represents my virtual Best Wishes for these holidays, to all the community members.

AdvancedFull instructions providedOver 6 days2,874

Things used in this project

Hardware components

BBC micro:bit board

The entire lighting and motion is controlled by just his tiny and powerful card

Adafruit NeoPixel Ring: WS2812 5050 RGB LED

I used a NeoPixel 12 LEDs ring

Kitronik All-in-one Robotic Board

As I started to test the feature of this board I was very impressed! It can control up to four DC motors (or two stepper motors) AND up to 8 servos, with an independent power source to the external devices while powering the BBC micro:bit. One of the most interesting aspects of this expansion board, IMHO, is communicating to the micro:bit via I2C. In few words, after you have connected all the stuff for your robotic project the micro:bit has already all the available GPIO pins free. I found this invaluable for this project.

RobotGeek Continuous Rotation Servo

SG90 Micro-servo motor

white LED Strip

These are a couple of cheap Chinese white LED strips originally powered by USB connector, chained together and soldered to be powered by the Kitronik's robot board with light intensity control

SparkFun Electret Microphone Breakout

Portable LED flashlight

I have used and disassembled four cheap small portable flashlights with high-intensity LEDs. I hacked these parts creating four colored spot lights

Software apps and online services

BBC micro:bit blocks

The software has been written with Javascript compatibles with the online Blocks editor offered to program the BBC micro:bit board from the microbit.org site

Hand tools and fabrication machines

Eleksmaker laser engraver and cutter

To cut the cardboard and some other parts I have used the Eleksmaker A5 model with a 2500 mW blue laser

Dremel hot glue gun

Elegoo MARS LCD resin 3D printer

Story

The design idea was to make a complete scenario representing - inside a box - a metaphor of the most popular Christmas symbols. Maybe it is a bit distopyc but it moves, lights and reacts to music. The other not easy aspect of the building was just to use the cardboard as the primary material. The central moving parts have been inspired by the incredible quantity of DIY Marble Machines you can find on YouTube (just put the two terms for searching videos and you remain speechless)

A more detailed description of the electronic assembly can be found on the Element14 Project14 blog post. Below the video of the final building followed by some photos of the cardboard mechanic building.

The Christmas Joy Spreading Machine while spreading joy and merry to all the world

Designing and Making the Parts

Excluding the electronic components and board (the cost amount does not reach 50$) and few $ for the spay paint the building is inexpensive. The primary material I used is recycled cardboard, the gold balls come from a 16 pieces ping-pong balls (0.58 $) while the chrome supports are a set of drinking straws (096 $) The base of the front rotating engine is a sheet of recycled packaging foam.

1 / 6 • Cutting the cardboard components

As you can see in the above images, the design of the parts needs a considerable precision when cut. It is possible to do this printing the SVG files on paper then using them as a guide to cut the cardboard but using a DIY laser has saved me a lot of time, reaching the highest precision possible.

After cutting, the parts have been assembled together making the components then painted with acrylic spray paint. The images below shows some of the building steps.

1 / 8 • Building the rotating engine

The coloured light spots:

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I should admit that without the laser cutting option I had to resign to hand-cut the city skyline with all the small windows, maybe searching for some alternative option.

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