Inspired by Marek Michalowski‘s Spazzi, Andrew Terranova’s (aptly named) EconoSpazzi offers quite the (music-reactive-head-)bang for the buck! As with many of the robots that he designs, this one is shared on the site he co-runs, Let’s Make Robots!

Here’s what Erin shared about EconoSpazzi: “Fun intro robot, and you can get a bit of personality from the 3 solenoids!”

While I was filming Make: Live episode 12 with Becky Stern and Matt Richardson, I saw they had a Beatbots Spazzi. I love those things. Becky was really nice and gave me a set of the Makerbot printer parts. I was really stoked to make one.

However, when I looked up the other parts I would need, I saw that the solenoids they were specifying on the Makezine.com website were $18 each. That’s too much for my wallet.

I knew a source for a similar solenoid for only $1.50 each. Thus, econoSpazzi was born.

Here’s the site for the original Spazzi project on Makezine.com. I bought my solenoids from allelectronics.com (update: No longer available last I checked). They are rated for 24V DC, but I found that after I cut the included spring to size, they worked fine at 10-12V DC.

Read More.