Mintomat: An Overcomplicated Gumball Machine

How do you get teenagers interested in science, technology, and engineering? [Erich]’s team at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences makes them operate three robots to get a gumball. The entire demonstration was whipped together in a few days, and has been field-repaired at least once; a green-wire fix was a little heavy on the solder and would short out to a neighboring trace when mechanical force was applied.

There are some interesting details of the build, including the choice to use an nRF24 2.4 GHz radio for communicating between the main board and the roving robot component, and some gratuitous LED drivers and an interesting time-of-flight distance sensor. Check it out if you’re interested in building small bots.

The game looks fun, and if building cool toys is what it takes to get youngsters into technical education these days, we’re all for it. Whether that’s simple robotic systems like these or a scarily realistic nuclear reactor simulator made of Lego blocks, we have to say that we’re inspired too.

Filed under: robots hacks

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