A Candy Bot for Socially Distanced Halloween Trick-or-Treating
This robot sees when someones walks up, then dispenses a mini candy bar.
Halloween is always a big event for hackers, and this year, with social distancing in effect, likely even more so. As an option for safe candy dispensing, creator “dtan19” has come up with the aptly named Social Distancing Halloween Candy Robot.
This device takes the form of a 3D-printed robot shell, on top of a plywood box that dispenses mini chocolate bars through an opening on the front. The Arduino-based bot scans the area in front of it with an HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor, using a 28BYJ-48 stepper motor to look left and right.
When it sees a trick-or-treater, it then releases candy via a wheel and chute assembly, concealed within the box, and actuated with another stepper. The project runs on a USB power supply, allowing it to be placed as needed, without the restriction of a power cable.
Aside from giving out candy, the device can be programmed to make sounds using an audio amplifier and SD card reader. Robot-style speech/sounds are generated with text2speech.org, though dtan19's write-up notes that there is a bit of an issue using the stepper at the same time as when producing sound output. Fortunately, there's plenty of time until Halloween to resolve this, and it looks like a great place to start and/or get inspiration for your dispenser!