MAKER: Candy Crane Robot

Abstract

Candy Crane is a custom-made robot that looks like a traditional tower crane and is used to pick candies by the young users for fun and for learning mechatronics product design. The tower structure is made from either aluminum C-channels or plastics made from 3D printer. Two 12V DC motors and several limit switches are used to control the movement of the crane. A miniature crane to be held by the user is equipped with a linear potentiometer and rotary potentiometer and is used to control the movement of the big tower crane wirelessly through a blue tooth module. An Arduino microcontroller is used as a master to send the movement commands from the miniature crane to the Lego Mindstorm’s NXT Brick mounted on Candy Crane. The NXT Brick serves as a slave to relay the commands to drive the DC motors to place the hook to proper location. Once the hook is in the right position, the user can send the hook down to pick up the candy of his/her choice. The user can learn mechanical design, electronic design and programming from the mechatronic toy