Adding brightness control, and some motion

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The Maker said...

Adding brightness control, and some motion

Once I have the color selection working, I add a second knob, to mimic Onna’s design, that controls the overall brightness of the lights. Basically, it acts like a dimmer. 

At this point, I have the basic electronics of Onna’s design figured out, and I can start to think about a few enhancements. Dominic suggested maybe the fish in Onna’s sketch could move, and I think that’s a great idea – I can do that with a servo. I find a continuous rotation servo in my parts organizer. I brush up a bit on how to power up servos and how to control them with Arduino, and it comes back pretty fast. I solder up a little power supply for it, and hook everything up. It works as intended! The prototype of the electronic “guts” is pretty much done and it looks like spaghetti, but I'll clean it up later. I'll also add a few pulleys later so that with that single one servo, I can spin around lots of fish. For now it just spins a little piece of tape so that I can adjust the speed.

The Maker
Isabel Deslauriers
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