We all are exposed to piggy banks as children: our family encouraging us to save our coins up. But the simple porcelain pig has become much more over the years.
In the mid-1800s, mechanical banks appeared. They often were cast iron with springs to trigger flinging a coin into the bank slot.
With the widespread availability of batteries, designers sought to motorize banks in creative ways. Here is a list of some of the robotic banks we’ve found interesting:
Robbie the Robot (also the Youtube video at the top of the article)
We’ve got some motorized bank ideas we’ll be developing in coming days – do you have some great ideas on automated banks? Please post them in the comments below!
Make a robot friend with Adafruit’s CRICKIT – A Creative Robotics & Interactive Construction Kit. It’s an add-on to our popular Circuit Playground Express, FEATHER and other platforms to make and program robots with CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. Start controlling motors, servos, solenoids. You also get signal pins, capacitive touch sensors, a NeoPixel driver and amplified speaker output. It complements & extends your boards so you can still use all the goodies on the microcontroller, now you have a robotics playground as well.
