Well, my hubby is a tinkerer. Last night, we spent the evening breaking apart I can't even begin to tell you how many CD drives to get gears and motors out of them. It took us almost 3 hours, but we had a blast. Today, he asked me if he could do craft, and we ended up with Marker Skitter Bots!!!! Because he was the mastermind behind this, he will be our guest blogger tonight! (first time ever- i feel like i should feel special or something :-p) ***Let me just leave it at this- unless you know how to play with motors, and do basic electrical wiring, please, do not try this at home!*** We are blessed to have a man in the house that loves to do stuff like this.
Today we made drawings with a sharpie skitterbot. I've seen this idea many places - education/electronics websites, festivals, etc. First, the preparation: Due to the amount of hot glue and soldering involved, I had to do this part by myself. I look forward to being able to involve the girls in this more as they get older. I started with a motor freshly harvested from a defunct CD ROM drive, hot glued a nut to it slightly off center to give it the desired imbalance, and then hot glued the motor to the bottom of a plastic cup. I hot glued on 3 sharpie markers as legs. I soldered the leads from the motor to a handy 4xAA battery holder from my parts bin. I initially tried to make it work with just one wire soldered and using the other wire as a makeshift switch held together with a twist, but it proved unreliable and got in the way, so I soldered them both and taped it up. We pulled a battery out to stop it when we wanted to. Most times I've seen this, the battery holder is attached to the cup, and the whole thing is left alone to do its thing. However, I decided to leave the battery holder as a sort of leash for it so that the girls could drag it around, and to make it a little lighter.
Now, on to the fun part: We covered the table with kraft paper and put 2 pieces of printer paper on it - one each girl. I gave control over to Iris first, and showed her how to drag it around gently, and how to give it nudges to make her design. She seemed to have fun dragging it around, but was a little hesitant to push it directly. After a few breaks to unwind the wires (slight defect in controlling it with the battery wires - they get tangled up as it spins around), and a lot of drawing, we handed control over to Penny. She preferred to just hold the battery pack over it and let it go on its own, so her drawing ended up being more dominated by circles as it spun around freely.
It was fun to see how different the two patterns turned out when they were done.
Mom and I got into the action after the girls were done and filled up the Kraft paper with marker. I tried to make a heart shape, but it didn't turn out very well. Finally, one of my hasty solder joints succumbed to the twisting and the bot shut down.
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