For this week I decided to apply the knowledge acquired during the past classes in order to create a candy dispenser machine that would provide the candies when the user makes a gesture with the hand, like if they were asking for the candies to come out.
The main idea behind the concept was to create a machine that would recognize basic human expressions to activate the servo motor and for that I used the gesture of curling the fingers.
Breadboard setup
I started by setting up the breadboard with a flex sensor as an analog input and a servomotor as a digital output. The intention is that when the hand bends the servomotor is going to change the angle of rotation, allowing the candies to pass throw the holes that are going to become concentric (once the servomotor start rotating).
Arduino Program
The instruction that I am giving to the program is to receive the value from the flex sensor, and mapping them to the value of the amount of degrees that I need the servomotor to rotate in order to align the two circular holes.
Machine setup
The final result is a “Lazy Candy Dispenser” (for this week I decided not to use any new materials and build it all with recycled materials) that “understands” a human gesture and transform it into an action.