This is my latest Solar powered Animatronic Butterfly.
She will flap her wings in the lightest of breezes and fend off the bees. The Solar cell circuit is based around a “Miller Engine” , it basically charges up a 1 Farad capacitor and then ports this power in one go to the motor that drives the wings. This configuration allows her to work in very low light conditions.
She was designed using Blender 2.68a as an exercise in creating drive systems for ornithopter systems.
It was a good test for my Ultimaker and most of it was printed @ 0.15mm resolution.
The Wings were printed with Flexi_PLA to give that realistic wing overshoot flap….
No she does not fly freely (because of her “Holy” wings) but does a good job of fooling the neighbors on our balcony ….. however i extrapolate that the mechanism could be speeded up to accommodate some flying derivative.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell with Google Hangouts On-Air is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
