A couple weeks back, I delivered what is now known as “Man Stirring Something Up” or MSSU to my sister. This largely completes my part of it, although I’m still working on dealing with some issues with the sonar distance detector, which it appears can be fixed using a more expensive version of what I started with. Anyhow, the video below shows it assembled with the hoops, operating in my sister’s studio. The sonar detector is being held on with blue masking tape and you will see a laptop off to the side that I was using to debug the sonar detector. My sister is currently in the process of making the surround which will hide the mechanism.

Since much of the code to move everything was written for previous projects, things are moving along rapidly at the moment. There were a few things that need be fixed, primarily where previously written code was never actually used and so there were a few errors. With the addition of the motion of the head, all motion is now functioning as can be seen in the video. Now I need to get the person detector going. While I’ve never used this detector before it looks to be easy to use. Next step after that will be to refine the actual sequence to work as my sister specified. The final step will be the addition of the orbiting LEDs.

I reached a significant milestone with the Spinning Man today. All three parts now can spin at once. It is a relief to know that everything will operate through the spinning slip rings. The video below shows the firmware homing the bowl and the turntable, then it pauses for five seconds, starts the stirring, five second pause, start the bowl, five second pause, start the turntable. After some period, everything is stopped at once.

With the completion of the main board for the Stirring Man, the electronics for this project are now largely done. The photo shows the mechanism from the bottom. Once again I’ve used a PSoC5 as the controller and you can see the PSoC prototype board mounted on the main board. The stepper drive board is not yet mounted on the main board. An aluminum “spider” is used to support the sliprings centered over the turntable to feed the wiring from the main board to the turntable.

With the completion of the mainboard, it’s on to writing code. A good deal of this is already done, since I’ve used the stepper drivers, neo-pixels and the same servo in previous projects, so the low level code can be reused.

With the completion of the motor drive board for the Stirring Man turntable, the upper 2/3 of the Stirring Man is now complete. With the switch to a stepper drive, I was able to reduce the height of the drive assembly, resulting in a more compact mechanism. The photo shows the completed unit from the bottom.

You can see the wires snaking around the large black pulley and disappearing into the slip ring which transfers them to the bowl on the other side. The stepper drive board will go on the twin rows of headers once some electrical checks are completed.

My sister’s latest project is a figure sitting in a rotating bowl, stirring something in a bowl with the bowl the figure sits in turn orbiting on a platform. And just for good measure, the figure’s head goes up and down and there are orbiting lights around the whole thing. Due to the nested motions implementing this presents a challenge, which is met by things called slip rings, which allow wires to make it through rotating joints. The motions are all relatively low speed, and for this kind of thing you’d normally use gear motors. Unfortunately, gear motors tend to be noisy and that ruins the effect. So I ended up switching to using stepper motors. This involves more wiring, but fortunately small slip rings with 12 wires are available (on Amazon of course) at a reasonable cost.

The video below shows the outer bowl orbiting on its platform. There will be surround around the turntable hiding the mechanism.

The video below shows the man stirring and the bowl rotating. Depending on if they counter-rotate or not, the effective speed of the stirring changes. This video was taken using the gear drive motors so you can get a feel for how noisy they are.

The stepper motors have been retrofitted, but because of the complexity of stepper motor drive, running it with them requires a pretty much fully developed control system due to having to run everything through the slip rings.

More to come.