Introduction: Arduino Controlled Marble Maze
This is a simple Arduino project to control a marble maze. The Marble Maze (you can control it online) comes from a project at TeleToyland, and the build instructions are at the this Instructable. For a recent show, I needed to allow kids to play with the maze under local control. Since the maze was designed for the web site, the operations are only up, down, left and right. For each move, the board tilts in the desired direction, then tilts up. So, the design of the maze is interesting - the maze appears to be more open than the limited moves allow.
For the control, I used 4 soft touch push button switches from Radio Shack mounted in a spare plastic box. A single Arduino Uno was used for controlling the servos. The I/O pins are wired to ground through 10K resistors, and pulled high when the buttons are pressed - just like the Arduino button sketch. I used a 6 wire tether to the control box - +5, Gnd, and 4 lines for the buttons. I put the grounding resistors right in the box. The Arduino sketch is attached.
This Instructable has a newer and easier build of this Marble Maze.
For the control, I used 4 soft touch push button switches from Radio Shack mounted in a spare plastic box. A single Arduino Uno was used for controlling the servos. The I/O pins are wired to ground through 10K resistors, and pulled high when the buttons are pressed - just like the Arduino button sketch. I used a 6 wire tether to the control box - +5, Gnd, and 4 lines for the buttons. I put the grounding resistors right in the box. The Arduino sketch is attached.
This Instructable has a newer and easier build of this Marble Maze.