Embedded Arduino Paper Automata Response

What I found surprisingly difficult about this assignment was, surprisingly, making the paper automata itself. I chose to make the pyramid lifter because I couldn’t quite understand what it was supposed to do from reading the descriptions. As I made progress, I started understanding the mechanism, and that it was actually a rather simple one. The problem was, the book’s instruction. The diagrams were confusing and the glossy paper was not suited for folding so much. So, I would say, the most difficult part about this assignment was following instructions in the book…

On a side note, hiding the arduino and the battery pack was a bit challenging. I originally wanted to have a pedestal underneath the automata to hide the p-comp guts. But the crank is attached to the side of the automata unit. So I somehow had to figure out a way to translate the work of the servo to the crank, but I could not figure that out. Now when I think about it, I think I should have used gears like the ones in the duck and pond automata in the book. I think that would have worked.

On the contrary, what was surprisingly easy was the coding and the wiring parts. It was my first time using the micro, and at first I wasn’t sure how I was going to tackled the 5v and ground issues, because there aren’t enough pins on the Micro. But I ended up using the wire wrapping tool to wrap both the servo and the range finder’s 5v and ground wires to the pins. So that worked out relatively easily.