Random Projects
Posted: April 17, 2020
Updated: August 1, 2021
Introduction
Here's a page for just a few random projects I made videos for but aren't interesting enough to do a full write-up for.
Related Projects @mikekohn.net
| Artwork: | XOR Gate, Motion Eyes, WS2812 LED, LED Panel, Half Adder, Cyborg Chicken, Electric Cat Fight, Iced Electronics |
Underwear Sail Car
As an alternative to brown energy this is my contribution to green energy. The concept here is simple: servo motor used to rotate the front wheels for steering, XBee radios so the remote control can send commands, a couple MSP430 microcontrollers, and a wind sail made from Fruit Of The Loom underwear.
Remote Controlled Rollerskate
This was going to be a bigger project, but I kind of got sick of working on it halfway through. This is actually the same circuit as the underwear sail car with a little programming difference. This circuit uses a Pololu motor driver instead of a servo to control two motors on the back of the skate connected to two wheels. I had a really hard time with this because the skate wheels were slippery and couldn't get a grip on the wood floor of my house. I wrapped them in cut-up balloons and it helped. On the carpet at work, as seen in this video, it worked.
Propeller Car
I had a set of 4 little quadcopter motors that I used on the Chicken Bone Quadcopter project. After that project was "done" I took the motors with propellers off and hooked them up to a small wood structure with Pololu wheels and metal casters on the front. There are the same casters used in the Electric Cat Fight project.
Social Distancing Enforcer
Here's a Social Distancing Enforcer Circuit. Going to take this with me to the grocery store and push that button anytime someone gets too close to me.
Invisalign Gesture Sensor
My dentist set me up with some Invisalign thingies. I put a new tray in every 2 weeks for 20 weeks and at the end I have straight teeth. After week 1 I didn't know what to do with the useless trays so I made this thing using some i2c gesture sensor... and some clay.
Snax The Sloth
While at Walmart one day I saw this... stuffed sloth that had electronics to move the mouth and eyes and figured it might be fun to take apart. I replaced the electronics with my own based around an MP3 board from SparkFun and an MSP430 microcontroller. I wrote the code in Java (seemed appropriate) and compiled it to run on MSP430 with Java Grinder.
Coughing Corona Can
I wanted to build this during the height of covid-19 (corona virus) and leave it either on top of my car in a parking lot or on top of a trash can infront of a store. There is a PIR sensor that senses motion so when people would walk by the Corona can would cough. The speaker doesn't sound very nice in the can unfortunately. The circuit is done with an ESP32-C3 RISC-V core. The sound is done by PWM'ing a single GPIO pin.
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