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Plan A : cheap chinese solar gadget

A project log for Mushroom on wheels

Animate the famous SuperMario's mushroom

pixjuanPixJuan 01/03/2018 at 21:150 Comments

 In order to make my mushroom move back and forth, I wanted to use a cheap chinese solar powered toy :

Using such a toy would be a lot easier than trying to build a tiny moving platform from scratch.

Concerning this toy, I honestly don't know what kind of sun exposition is required to get it to move, even when using my phone flash, it was barely moving. So I removed the solar panel and did some tests.

The motor is really tiny, so naively I first tried to power it from the pins of an ATiny85, not expecting much. It worked a bit, the motor start turning, but it is far from enough to move an object.

I tried to power it with an op-amp just in case, but it was only providing 15-20 mA on its ouputs so it was not working much better.

I definitely needed an H-Bridge, so I got one but as I was using a 3V coin cell so the engine was  running too fast for my needs. I tried to add a resistor, but then it was not moving anymore.

At some point the motor just fried :-(

So long for plan A...

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