My goal was to play with a handful of different motors and get comfortable with different motor wirings and code. I wound up making an email notification system that would connect via IFTTT to my servo and show me a red paper exclamation point alert. Per the exercise, I did not use real data (not connected to IFTTT) but I was able to test and show functionality using the Particle cloud.
My goal is to have a red paper exclamation point that is attached to my servo's arm component increment up each time an email arrives in my inbox. I felt this would be a gentler and more meaningful visualization of the accumulation of email versus the red circle with a count that notifications currently use. Personally, 10 unread emails is enough for me to "feel the email pileup" and at that point, I would like the red paper exclamation point up at 90 degrees which is the max distance it can go (constrained to that upper limit). I would use IFTTT to connect this up, but for purposes of the video below, I tested the functionality using the Particle cloud for now.
Ideally, the system would reset to zero when I've read all my unread emails that came in (not sure how I would do this) but, at a minimum, I could use delay ( ) or millis ( ) to have the whole thing reset to zero after a certain amount of time has passed.
I used to the setup for the solenoid (though my solenoid did not work) for the fan and show it's ability to turn and blow a couple of paper fragments held on a string. The video shows the live demo and below are two pictures showing the setup as well as the corresponding code.
I was excited when the servo initially worked and was very satisfied. Working with the solenoid was more challenging that I thought it would be, and I was very worried about ruining my board and components with bad wiring. Even after checking the setup repeatedly, I could not get it to work. I tried both setups - the one we saw in the class demo and the one included in the tutorial (diode placed slightly differently). I gave up and used the fan instead and that worked!
I used the trusty servo which gave me some breathing room not to worry about wiring and code, but instead think about what I would actually enjoy making to solve a problem that I had. But I was glad to use the fan as well and make a simple demo - a stronger fan would allow me to put a clear glass over over it with a pile of small, white paper hope punch-outs and make my own snow globe (inspired by Zimoun). The brushless fan can only move one or two paper fragments, but still good enough to show how a globe could work.
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