Ice Cream Truck

Original Idea

Initially, I just wanted to have a music box turned automatically by a battery-operated motor so that someone wouldn't have trouble with the fine motor controls needed to turn the handle repeatedly.

Originally, I was thinking of a flat disk that would have two holes in which the gearbox motor shaft and the music box handle be attached, but I got confused if that this setup would preserve the correct arc of rotation needed to turn the music box handle.

When I was thinking about that, I also didn't realize that I did not have the correct battery holders needed to power the motor and would need to also think of a solution for that; I had 1 AA battery holder, but I didn't realize that since the motor required 3-6V, I would need more of them...

Teaming Up With Sean

When I spoke to Sean, we realized our projects separately would be way more fun combined than separate - an ice cream truck. His project initially was a car while mine was just a static music box. Since he was using a continuous rotation servo that was powered by Arduino, we realized that I could also use the same power source, thus solving my power problem.

For mounting our motors, we didn't have the nice stands, so we decided to make a makeshift one. We stacked small laser-cut wooden squares that we would glue together and then screw to the motor.

Drilling holes into these squares was essentially the "Make 5 Things" exercise all over again. Our process was essentially:

1. Line up the motor with a square and trace the hole where the screw would go

2. Go to the drill press and stack the squares (around 4-5 at a time). Clamp very tightly

3. Drill all the way through.

Each screw side for the motor involved stacking and gluing 3 of the wooden squares per side.

Once the setup for my servo was completed, the rest was pretty straightfoward. I just glued and placed my music box and servo on the car.

Final Result