For decades, I’ve wanted to do a snake basket that combined the two popular versions from the late 1990s. Those two were Terry Lunceford’s Viper and Collector’s Workshop’s Khyber Kobra. I wrote a blog post about those two a few months ago, which includes videos of them; you can read it here. In a nutshell, I wanted to combine the two of them, so there’s the byplay of the Khyber Kobra with the ending of the Viper.
I’ve been working on learning to use Arduino and over the summer I made a working model on an Arduino simulator, but haven’t had time to actually make it, until a few days ago.
The arrangement above has a lot of wires, but it works! All of the functions do their thing. Like any project, once it becomes a physical thing, it will change. I realized I could eliminate one motor and have one servo handle two tasks. The motor would make the snake rise, then the servo would make it move back and forth. I decided to eliminate the motor and have the servo make the snake rise and shake. That simplified this a lot, and here’s the new wiring:
Usually, simpler is better; here’s less to go wrong, and it’s easier to diagnose if something does go wrong.
The next step will be to move it from an Arduino UNO board to an ESP32 board and put everything onto a PCB board for more sturdy final version of this.
-Louie