Introduction: Laser Spirograph Using Arduino

By

I was fascinated with Quackmaster Dan's "Four Motor Laser Spirograph" so I decided to build one. The pictures represent about a year and a half of procrastination, and late nights, all in all it probably took me about 80hr. to build as I had to go through a couple revisions of the electrical system, and it was totally worth it.


If you have any questions about components or fabrication, leave them in the comments and I will gladly answer.

Update 2013-10-12:

I am currently working on an updated version of this and plan to have it done by late January 2014 (I will write a full ible for it). In the process of planning that build I found my old arduino code that ran this spirograph, it is very basic, but I might be useful to those working on similar projects:

#include

AF_DCMotor motor1(1, MOTOR12_64KHZ);  // create motor #1, 64KHz pwm
AF_DCMotor motor2(2, MOTOR12_64KHZ);
AF_DCMotor motor3(3, MOTOR34_1KHZ);
AF_DCMotor motor4(4, MOTOR34_1KHZ);

int PotPin1 = 5;                      // Analog Input from Potentiometers
int PotPin2 = 4;
int PotPin3 = 3;
int PotPin4 = 2;

int Rate1 = 0;                       
int Rate2 = 0;
int Rate3 = 0;
int Rate4 = 0;


void setup() {
  Serial.begin(9600);               // set up Serial communication at 9600 bps
  Serial.println("Spirograph!");

  motor1.run(FORWARD);              // Set all fans to run forward. They will not run backwards
  motor2.run(FORWARD);
  motor3.run(FORWARD);
  motor4.run(FORWARD);


}

void loop() {


  //Read and Map AI to Rate#

  Rate1 = analogRead(PotPin1);
  delay(15);
  if( Rate1 != 0 ) {
    Rate1 = map(Rate1, 1, 1023, 20, 255);
  }


  Rate2 = analogRead(PotPin2);
  delay(15);
  if( Rate2 != 0 ) {
    Rate2 = map(Rate2, 0, 1023, 20, 255);
  }

  Rate3 = analogRead(PotPin3);
  delay(15);
  if( Rate3 != 0 ) {
    Rate3 = map(Rate3, 0, 1023, 60, 255);
  }

  Rate4 = analogRead(PotPin4);
  delay(15);
  if( Rate4 != 0 ) {
    Rate4 = map(Rate4, 0, 1023, 60, 255);
  }

  output(Rate1, Rate2, Rate3, Rate4);

  if( Rate1 == 255 && Rate2 == 255 && Rate3 == 255 && Rate4 == 255){

    for(int a=0; a < 255; a+=10){
      output(180, 100+a, 250, 0);
      delay(500);
      }
      output(100,0,0
    for(int b=0; b < 155; b+=10){
      output(180, 0, 0, 100+b);
      delay(500);
    }
  }


}

void output(int m1, int m2, int m3, int m4) {

  motor1.setSpeed(m1);
  motor2.setSpeed(m2);
  motor3.setSpeed(m3);
  motor4.setSpeed(m4);

  Serial.print("Motor Speeds\t");
  Serial.print("\tM#1:");
  Serial.print(m1);
  Serial.print("\tM#2:");
  Serial.print(m2);
  Serial.print("\tM#3:");
  Serial.print(m3);
  Serial.print("\tM#4:");
  Serial.println(m4);

}