This machine is controlled by a PicAxe Microcontroller. A servo (used for steering in R/C cars) is used to tilt the track for a ball to roll round. The degree of the tilt can be controlled by a potentiometer in manual mode or in automatic mode preset instructions on the microcontroller tell the servo how to move.
I struggled to find a name for this. I eventually settled on Perpetual Ball Roller. I like the "perpetual" part because it gives an idea that the ball will just keep going round and round but the name doesn't really describe what it is. I can't believe someone else hasn't made something similar but because I had no idea what to search for on Google I haven't found anything. If you are wondering what it is the best thing to do is it to watch the video. I'll detail some of the features here incase I didn't mention them on the video or you can't watch it.
There isn't really a simple figure of how long it took to make but I'll try and give a rough idea. The main construction of the frame and ring took about 3 hours. I'm not too bad at this kind of work as I have done quite a few similar things before. It took about 1.5 hours to wire up a very simple Picaxe circuit with servo and potentiometer and put the code on for very basic control with no limits. I realise this might be a bit slow to some people but I tend to take electronics slowly. I then spent another hour mounting the servo properly (before it was held down). For the actual coding of the different routines maybe 5 to 6 hours. You could do these in a lot less time (2 hours easily) but I was in no hurry and wanted to experiment. All those add hours add up to 12 hours (rounded up!).
Rolls a ball around a ring
Actuators / output devices: Servos
Power source: 3AA for logic circuits, 4 AA batteries for servos
**Pretty cool contraption. Id**<br>Pretty cool contraption. Id love to see 3 concentric rings with a ball each for seconds minutes and hours. Of course you couldn`t tip it on its side to put on the wall but cool idea none the less.
I’d like to see a fersion with feeback, so the PIC “knows” where the ball bearing is. Perhaps a set of wires positioned equally around the track which shirt as the stell ball passes them.
The idea would be: if the ball is stopped, the pic would recognise when to start jiggling it because it’s moved away from its rest position. This wouldensure it doesn’t waste any “jiggles” and that it doesn’ “jiggle” too fast initially. (It would also enable the figgling to sotp if it throws the ball off!!)
The ideal feedback mechanism would be a principle called Time Domain Reflectometry. Maybe need a faster processor for this one…!
