Collaborate Disseminate
Halloween may be behind us, but we couldn’t resist showing you [Mellow]’s latest project: an automatic candy dispenser that takes the hard work out of serving trick-or-treaters. It’s a cool …read more Continue reading Automatic Candy Dispenser Takes the Hard Work out of Halloween
Still don’t have anything for Valentine’s Day? We wholeheartedly suggest that you fire up that printer and get ready to fall in love with engineering all over again, because [JBV Creative] has designed a super-sweet piece of machinery that would …read more
Continue reading Express Your Love with Candy and Engineering
One of our favorite things about Halloween is the sheer number of hacks that come out of it each year. This year, hacking is almost a requirement to keep things physically distanced, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun. You want fun? How about a candy cannon that launches …read more
Continue reading Trick or Yeet Cannon Will Give Them Candy Shell Shock
A lot can be done with simple motors and linear motion when they are mated to the right mechanical design and control systems. Teaching these principles is the goal behind the LCMT (Low Cost Mechatronics Trainer) which is intended primarily as an educational tool. The LCMT takes a “learn by doing” approach to teach a variety of principles by creating a system that takes a cup from a hopper, fills it with candy from a dispenser, then sorts the cups based on color, all done by using the proper combinations of relatively simple systems.
The Low Cost Mechatronics Trainer can …read more
Continue reading Watch The Low-Cost Mechatronics Lab Dispense Candy, Sort Cups
Picture it: Halloween, 2018. You want to go to a party or take the kids out trick-or-treating, but remember what happened last year when you weren’t there to answer the door? A pack of wild children blew their allowances on 48 rolls of the cheapest toilet paper ever printed, and it took you four full hours to get all the sodden, dew-laden wads out of your rose bushes.
Halloween is a time to fear things like hobgoblins and the possibility of The Purge becoming a thing, not sugar-fueled children who are upset that you left out a bowl of Sixlets, …read more
When we see what [Jason Allemann] does with LEGO, we wonder why more one-offs aren’t made this way. This time he’s made a Halloween mechanical marvel that will surely scare more kids than anything else they’ll encounter on their rounds — so much so that many may even decline the chocolate it dispenses. Who wouldn’t when to get it you have to reach over an animatronic skeleton hand that may grab you while a similarly mechanized spider may lunge onto your hand.
The chocolate dispensing, the hand and the spider are all animated using four motors, a LEGO Mindstorms EV3 …read more
Continue reading Mechanical Marvel Trades Courage for Chocolate
When we see what [Jason Allemann] does with LEGO, we wonder why more one-offs aren’t made this way. This time he’s made a Halloween mechanical marvel that will surely scare more kids than anything else they’ll encounter on their rounds — so much so that many may even decline the chocolate it dispenses. Who wouldn’t when to get it you have to reach over an animatronic skeleton hand that may grab you while a similarly mechanized spider may lunge onto your hand.
The chocolate dispensing, the hand and the spider are all animated using four motors, a LEGO Mindstorms EV3 …read more
Continue reading Mechanical Marvel Trades Courage for Chocolate
A while ago, someone brought in a candy machine to AdaCore. Sometime after, [Fabien-Chouteau] was challenged to make it more… fun. So he decided to make it harder to receive candy — you know, to encourage knowledge growth — and discourage overeating of tasty treats.
The dispenser itself is pretty simple. It consists of a hopper containing the candies, a motor with a worm-gear for delivering said candies, and a small IR sensor that detects when you wave your hand underneath (in order to receive those sweet sweet candies).
He decided to leave the system operating as is, and …read more
