Circuitry: Bristle Bot

Welcome back in this activity

i will show you how to make a bristlebot

so to make a bristlebot

what you'll need is a toothbrush head

a motor

coin battery pipe cleaner

and some tape

so the first step is to take your motor

and your brush head and you'll want to

attach

your motor to the end of your brush head

this specific motor has

a piece of paper right here that you can

peel off and it has a sticky side

if your motor doesn't have a sticky peel

off

backing then you can just take some tape

and tape it onto your motor

and what that looks like is um like this

so you'll have

you'll have your motor here and then

your your toothbrush head

and your next step will be

to take some tape and fold it on itself

so what that

is like if you haven't done that before

is you take a little piece of tape here

and so this is a sticky side and you'll

want to make sure that the sticky side

is out

you'll just roll it on top like this

so that way it's fully sticky

all around and what you'll do with that

is you'll attach it to the opposite side

here

and now what you'll do is you'll take

this red wire and stick it to the tape

making sure that it's right about in the

center here

and then you're going to place the

battery above the wire so you're going

to find the negative side and place it

here

and just to test to make sure that

everything works you could take this

wire

and touch it to the positive side

and your battery should sorry excuse me

your motor should start

vibrating and you can feel that

now what you'll want to do similar to

the decorative led

is that you'll want to then place um

the blue wire on top and a piece of tape

and then you should have your working

bristle

and this will be what your bristle bot

looks like it'll start moving around

you can change a bit so you can see

mine's kind of

spinning in a circle and what you can do

to solve that

is to place your pipe cleaner

through these wires and you loop it

around the

the bristle here make sure you don't

pull out any of the wires so you might

have to go through underneath them

but as you do that you can make little

legs

and it might take a little bit of trial

and error in trying to

place the legs so that way it moves

in a straight line um

it'll take a little bit

of practice this is also helpful if for

whatever reason

your bristle bot keeps falling over

and i'll keep messing around with this

until i can get it

to move however i want

essentially

now that you have your working

bristlebot i want you to think a little

bit about

variables so variable is something that

can change or be changed that will have

an effect

on our outcome so let's say

you want your bristol bot to spin in

circles or you want it to

travel in a certain direction my

challenge to you

is what can you change on your

bristlebot

to make that happen can you move the

battery around

can you add multiple legs

check the different angles of the legs

you can maybe even add some weight to it

if you have something at home that you

can tape on and

and just see what happens right and the

next challenge

if you want to take the challenge

is taking some tape scissors cardboard

or cardstock

and creating a challenge course or a

maze for your bristlebot

this can look like anything you want it

to and your end goal is to

have the bristlebot go from start to

finish and i'd love to hear more about

what you created and how it worked out

for you and what variables you changed

to make your bristlebot

have a different outcome