Brown Dog Gadgets

So in this project we're going to make a solar bug from Brown Dog Gadgets. You can see this one is a ladybug. I've colored it very creatively and it has this little miniature solar panel on its back and that solar panel runs a very small little vibration motor and that's going to actually make our bug walk around when it's in the sun. It needs to be on a fairly smooth surface. It'similar in function to the bristlebots that you might have made before but the motor is a little bit different. Instead of the weight being thrown around up and down, it's actually going around sideways. So this bug doesn't bounce and j It more moves itself kind of creepy crawly So it needs a fairly smooth surface and you can see I've added some custom legs to this one and we're going to talk about designing different legs for your solar bug as well in a second video. But there's a special set of legs available for you without this kind of construction. So what we need is our solar panel. We need our motor. This is the vibration motor. We need two pieces of conductive tape, maker tape. We need a big piece of foam double sided tape. We need four googly eyes and we need our colored in bug shape. So I decided this time I would make a stag beetle. You can see on the back is the lady bug and you can color it however you want. You can try to color it realistic or you can color it kind of crazy So first thing that we're going to do is we're going to cut out our bug and you can do this really precisely if you want but you really don't have to. You can just get it sort of close to where it's close to the edges of the bug just so that it's not a big rectangular piece of cardboard that we're working with here. I'm going to get rid of that and I am going to cut in between his stag horns a little bit. Maybe if I get into a pushing contest with another solar bug these horns will come in handy to a certain extent. Alright so I got my stag beetle cut out. I'm going to set him aside. Now I'm going to make the circuit. So as you can see on the bottom of the solar panel we have two little metal leads right here. One over here and one over here. There's other copper points right there but the main ones that we are worried about are these kind of shiny silver metal ones that have been, this is solder that's on these contacts. This has a negative, this has a positive, this is showing us where the positive side of the battery. A solar panel is essentially a battery that's charged by the sun and then the negative side of that as well. It also has a little bit of plastic on top to protect it until we'ready for it so I'm going to peel that plastic coating off and get rid of that. Now here is my motor and on the one side of the motor it has this little white paper and that actually covers up some tape and so that's going to allow us to stick it to the solar panel so I'm just going to peel that off and then carefully flip that over and I'm going to stick it to the back of the solar panel in this black area between the two green parts. Trying to get it as close to the middle as possible and then just stick it on there. Now I have my blue and my red wires, it doesn't really matter which color I connect to which side. This is a type of motor that depending on which way electricity is flowing through it, it'll spin one way or spin the other way but it'll spin either way. It's not going to not spin on us so I'm going to put my red over there and my blue over there. I'm going to take my first piece of maker tape and again this has a paper backing on it so I'm just going to hold it, kind of run my finger on it, bend it and you'll see the tape will peel off and I can take that and I'm going to just put it over top of my wire and that little metal contact. So let me bend my wire a little bit more, I can hold it in place. You don't have to make super good contact because the maker tape will actually do that. As long as the maker tape is touching that metal bit and the wire itself, the wire could be way over, What we don't want is for it to be touching any of the parts in the opposite green side. That would create a short circuit and it wouldn't do what we wanted it to do with the motor. So there's one piece of maker tape and now we'll do the other. I'm just going to again hold it in one hand, kind of bend it with my finger and there it popped off and I'm going to do the same thing over here, connecting the blue wire to the other side of the solar panel. Now good thing to do right now is to actually take this outside into the sunshine and turn that over and see if it is vibrating. If it's not, then you've got a problem with your circuit and you'll have to fix that and it's better to fix it before we attach it to our bug because once we attach it to our bug, we pretty much have to, this tape that's going to hold it on there is really strong and in order to get it off, we'd almost have to rip the cardboard of our bug just to get it off. So I'm going to have a little faith that I did this correctly and I'm just going to go ahead and move on, but you probably want to go test it because you may only get one shot at that. So now that I have it, I'm going to take my foam double-sided tape and this has paper backing on both sides and so I'm going to peel the paper backing off one side and I'm going to put it down here on the black part of my solar panel and it's probably not conductive, almost certainly not conductive, but there's probably a good reason to avoid making contact between these two parts of maker tape. So I'm just going to keep it a little bit separated and then I'm going to peel off the other backing and I'm going to stick it on to my bug and you can see now why I didn't color the entire bug, it's because solar panel is going to cover a lot of that up. So there's our bug, there's our solar panel, our motor is in there, it's all connected up with maker tape. Now that's going to move, but this is the bottom of the cardboard is going to create too much surface area in contact with something so it's not going to move very well. So what I need to do is I need to reduce the surface area that's actually touching the surface that it's going to be on so that most of the motion doesn't get blocked out by friction and so a very creative solution to that and simple solution is to actually use googly eyes as legs and they've got a nice sort of rounded and smooth plastic surface and so if I take them and they're a little bit harder to get the paper backing off so if you got a little bit of a fingernail and you got to be a little bit patient to get that off of there but once you get it peeled a little bit you can peel it all the way and then you can place your googly eyes. There we go. So now I'm going to take this outside, I'm going to get a little piece of cardboard, pretty smooth surface and we're going to see how this thing does. So we got a nice sunshine day, my solar panel is acting as a power source for my solar bug and when I put them on the cardboard, there you go. So I'm going to take this out of the way and I'm going to put it back on the board and there you go.