Arduino, Beakman's Motor, and Instructables
Over ten years ago, I set up a web page describing how to make a simple electric motor that I saw on the Beakman's World TV show. Over the years, it has had hundreds of thousands of hits and I've received a lot of fan mail and questions about the project. I know that it is has been the subject of a lot of science fair projects (with quite a few wins) and I provided a few suggestions on using it in a science fair project. The hardest part of those suggestions had to do with how to measure the speed of the motor. I had several ideas, but I'd never tried any of them.
The other day I got another one of the "How do I measure the motor speed?" e-mails on the same day that I got my Arduino Diecimila board from the Make Store, so that sort of answered my question of "This is cool, now what do I do with it?" concerning the Arduino board: I made an optical tachometer to measure the speed of the Beakman's Motor and posted it on Instructables.
I hadn't even built one of the Beakman's Motors in a while, so it was a good exercise for that as well. The one I built runs at 1200 RPM, just in case you were wondering.
Instructable: Arduino-Based Optical Tachometer
Just as an aside, I've always been interested in hardware and electronics, but I'm always frustrated when I build something. I think I've finally figured out that I don't do it often enough to have developed any real skills for electronic construction (or design, for that matter). I think it through, read and research, make a few notes, collect my parts and then think it is all going to work first time, but then I forget basic stuff, have to look up basic facts (resistor color-code?), I'm appalled at how bad my breadboard full of parts looks, and so on. Just like any other physical activity, it takes practice and hard work to develop skill - knowledge alone won't do it. I need to build more stuff.
UPDATE:
The Make Magazine blog posted a link to my project (well, I submitted it to them, but they picked it up and posted it).
Labels:
arduino,
beakmans motor,
diy,
electronics,
instructables,
make,
microcontroller,
project,
science fair
3 comments:
Ditto Chris. Did I write that or did you!? Seems to be the frustration of my life too!!
I'm into solar heating, biogas, arduino... but I often feel I've read too many web pages and done not enough real experimenting on my own. Got to switch off the computer and get in the shed!! :)
kr
Marcel
Yeah, I think the "crafting" aspect is often ignored by people getting started in electronics. It requires not just knowledge, but practice, experience, and quite a few crafting/building/designing skills.
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