Homemade Magic Lamp Card Box

        A robot is a virtual or mechanical artificial agent. In practice, it is usually an electro-mechanical machine which is guided by computer or electronic programming, and is thus able to do tasks on its own (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot). Well, today you will learn exactly how to build a Homemade Magic Lamp Card Box. Really, this is two instructables combined into one, them being:
                   1) How to sculpt nearly ANYTHING out of extruded polystyrene.
                   2) How to design and build a pneumatic mechanism and control system. 

        As an introverted electrical engineering student sculpting really isn't my forte, so that took most of the time. Nearly 33 hours to get a final product! Needless to say I made up for some of that with the designing and building of the electronic control system, but it is all pretty simple, just takes a lot of time and dedication. The reason I made this was for my sister's wedding. The theme is the magic of Disney, so like any good brother would do I set off on a journey to design and create one of the most elaborate card boxes the world has ever seen!

                                           Let's Get Started!

Step 1 Design & Preparation

      Like all good robots, they must be well designed to function properly. However, I know that everyone will be building their own robot with their own design so I won't spend too long on this section. I just wanted to stress it's importance by giving it it's own step. For my project, I started from a picture of the magic lamp and created a scale drawing using Google SketchUp 8. It is a really great program for any hobbyist to learn because it's free and there isn't a very steep learning curve at all! I'll post the link for the download below. After I created my scale drawing, I knew I would need a design for the electronics. I used the EAGLE software package to design a schematic for my Electronic Control Board. Next, I decided that there would be too many cards to hold inside of the box, so I planned on making a chute for the cards to go through the table into their own container. Also, underneath the container would be the general control board shown in this picture. It would include the Electronic Control Box and the Pneumatic Control System. 

                    Links:
                                    Google SketchUp 8 Free Download
                                       CadSoft EAGLE Free Download
  

Comments

[ahrshin]

PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWERS! ,Itty-bitty living space! This is awesome!

[drewforchione]

Thank you for bringing that to my attention randofo, I changed the music and tried again!

[randofo]

I think perhaps the music in your video has resulted in this ridiculous error "This video contains content from UMG, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds."