Z Recommends: Craftjunk: Homemade Jumping Robot

Jumping Robot, aka "Little Puppy," With Corded Remote

I purchased this small motor for about $3 at Radio Shack. It has two little contacts for wires on the back and on the front has a single pin that spins when it is powered. We stuck a plastic wine cork on the pin as an eccentric weight, which means that as it spins it makes the motor vibrate. The further off-balance the weight, the more it jumps.

Actually, it took two motors to make this robot; we attached a shell made out of the wings of the pink duck, but we used superglue to attach them to the motor, which was fine but then we started adding pompoms and then lots of little plastic train set people riding all over it and eventually the motor stopped working - we either got superglue in the motor itself or it ate up the wiring. We had to remove all the parts, sub in a new motor, and decided to use only electrical tape this time, forgoing the shell.

The wire "leash" actually plays a key role in this robot's functioning, helping it to keep its balance far longer than it did with lighter weight cord I used previously.

The corded remote for the robot is shown below - a 9-volt battery and a button housed in the plastic container that previously held small hardware of some kind. A box from a deck of cards would have worked equally well. It was my father's brilliant idea to replace the very short cord I originally had leading from the remote to the robot with a longer one so that the user could stand up and "walk" the robot.

It may look complex, but I have no experience in this stuff and it was a piece of cake to hook up. The 9-volt battery hookup comes with two wires coming out of it, which you connect to the button and to the incoming wire, and the other yellow wire connects to the other contact on the button, creating a simple circuit with the button as an interrupter.

You can buy everything you need at Radio Shack; here's a link to their web store's Component Parts shop. For our next corded remote project I'll probably use a lighted rocker switch like the one at right.

Again, one of the best features of this robot is one of Z's random innovations: The little piece of ribbon we tied around its middle as decoration frequently gets in the way of the head, and makes a nice "thwip-thwip-twhip" sound. We're quickly learning techniques we'll be applying in the next generation of robots we'll be designing sooner or later.

Watch this robot in action:

Later this week I'll show you our third robot, a walking robot that draws with markers as it moves.

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