Servo Controlled Toy Carousel

This is a toy carousel controlled by a hobby servo. Why would we build such a thing? Well, we have this site where you can control fun robots and devices via the Internet, and I have a daughter who wanted to get involved.  So, the carousel is her project - you can make it go left or right, and she gets to decorate however she wants - usually seasonal.

You can check her current toy selection online at the TeleToyland Carousel.

In addition to it being a live web project that you can play with, it has two other interesting maker features:  It uses a regular hobby servo to drive a much bigger load, and we used small magnets to attach the carousel to the base so it can be removed and replaced easily - it just magnetically snaps on and off.

Step 1 The Carousel

For the Carousel, we cut a 12" circle from some MDF, then drilled some holes for the vertical dowels.  We ended up using a standard kitchen lazy susan under that, and used 6 thin magnets to hold them together.  We glued the magnets by putting them together in pairs, adding a drop of crazy glue to one side, and gluing it to the lazy susan, then adding a drop of glue to the magnets and placing the carousel on top.  Once the glue dried, we were able to remove the carousel easily, and replace it precisely.  We marked the two circles to make placement easy.

Note that we had originally tried a metal lazy susan bearing, but in testing, it seemed to lock up. Maybe we got some junk in the ball bearings. We did use oil etc. to no avail.  So, we went to the local store and found a wood lazy susan in the kitchen department. We replaced the metal bearing with that, and it works great. We should have just started with that first instead of the MDF wood circle, but since we had the other circle already cut and dowels glued on, we just put the existing one right on top.

Comments

[PeckLauros]

Verry nice. I liked.

[lemonie]

That's very nice. I would have put the wheel under the edge of the turntable.

L