Catapult With Arduino

I wanted to recreate Arduino Controlled Catapult. But because I had no experience whit Arduino, it was harder than I taught. Also I burnt my 9 volt cable so I needed to improvise how to do the electronic parts.

In the end I could not finish it, but you can see that there is not much left and can see when I wanted to achieve.

Step 1: Resources

Before you start, you need the following items.

• 8 coloured cables(at least black, red and yellow)

• Arduino Uno • USB cable

• 3 servos(2.5 kg is the one that I used), if you want to use stronger ones, you will need to use 9 volt, but my schematics is not set for that.

• 3 push buttons

• Wood for your catapult.

• Plastic to attach your servo

• Spring

Step 2: Draw What You Want

Draw how you will make your catapult, it does not to be a piece of art.

You need to have the base where you clue and hold your catapult, then you need your middle piece that fires. 2 pieces next to it is for its sturdiness. And last but not least, the drawing under is for your angle when you want to fire it.

Step 3: Get Your Wood

After drawing you need to get your wood and get them ready for the next parts.

Step 4: Scour

You need to scour the wood, so that it can move finer on the board.

Step 5: Let's Drill Some Holes

For this you need to drill holes on all your wood pieces and you need to drill 1 extra hole in the ones you will use for the angel.

But the most important is that you need to get 1 pin a bit loose, that’s the one that holds all the pieces together. if you don’t do that you can’t move your catapult properly. And the one that you will use for your angle needs to be stuck hard and should not move out.

Step 6: Get Your Plastics

This part can also be done differently, but I used plastic. This is to hold 2 servos 1 for the angle and 1 the spring. What you see here is that I warmed the plastic up and bended it. The bended part is used to screw it on the board. As you can see I already made the holes.

Step 7: We Need to Saw

After bending the plastic we need to saw some space for our servo’s. I did it with a fretsaw. Drill a small hole and use a fretsaw to make some space. After I was done sawing I remembered I also could laser it, but what’s done is done.

Step 8: Put It Together

So far so good, now we put everything together what we have so far. Also get some wood glue.

Step 9: Cabels

Like I said I burned my 9 volt cables, so I needed to change some things, but because of that you should be able to do it like this without resistors.

The yellow cables are used for code, red is for the buttons and black is the ground cables. If you understand this the rest makes more sense.

Step 10: Code

This step is for the code, if you don’t have this you can’t do anything. I’ll add the code as a zip file.

Step 11: Putting Everything Together

You can now compile and upload the code, get the cables and you should be done. At least as far as I got.

I could not finish it yet, but I can finish it later. So far you could see what I try to do, and maybe you can finish it yourself.

Please if you want to use stronger servos and use 9V don't burn the cables like me. Or have some spares that you can experiment on. Heat sinker might also help.

Thanks for sticking with me so far. Have Fun