What I did THANKSGIVING EDITION

It being Thanksgiving you would think I would take a break, but no siree! I worked a LOT and this time I had the help of my dad. And there were several developments in this project.

First of all: we metaphorically threw out the whole 3d printed front wing holder piece plan because even if we did get the motor going we knew it would still be too fast for the plastic to handle. Thus we decided to go with a more durable material: an erector set. But not just any erector set...my dad's erector set so it has be from like the 50s or so.

 We used two overlapping hinges in place of the front wing holder (they were from my dad's old van). Side note: me and dad have a lot of parts at home which we use so you'll soon see a pattern in where we get things.

We figured out how to intertwine the motor with the new front hing by taking a gear shaft from a remote control tank we once had but have long since gotten rid of (but the gears shaft was in the erector set for some reason). This made the same sort of motion as the Ornicopter model I have previous linked to and took the model from.

The most major development was the sensor which starts the motor. I knew I wanted to use a photocell but I was having difficulty finding a circuit layout which worked with what I wanted. That is when we found this old joker toy:

In theory, one just shines a light at the joker's chest (which contains a photocell) and he collapses and then comes back up. It was a pretty cute toy. My dad had used another of these on a tv to change the channel (though it didn't work as well since you had to shoot it just right or it wouldn't unmute the tv). So anyway, we opened it up and the mechanism is basically the same as the motor layout we were building:

We took the circuit board with resistors/etc. and attached it to our new motor and attached a new photocell to it. 

 One difficulty we found was the photocell would only respond to strobe lighting to activate it. We tried several ways including a cylinder but it just won't operate without a strobe light (it was too sensitive to regular light that it had to have a distinct change of light to actually change).

The other update of the plans was the addition of a front fan. In all versions of this project, the plan was to have the wings coming out of the back of the hat. However, since the old tank gear shaft (is that even the right word for a shaft that has multiple gears on it?) was so long it would stick out not just the back (as previously planned) but also the front. So we decided to include a propeller. This entire set up only requires two AA batteries.