Scribble-bot

Things never turn out as planned.  I picked up a small $1 vibrating motor (the kind that makes cell phones vibrate) and a paper thin silicon wafer solar cell.  I was going to hook them up according to something like the bristle bot over on the "get your mess on" blog, but so that the creature vibrated and moved in sunlight.  (The first robot I made, when I was in 5th grade, was with an electric motor, a solar cell I ordered out of a magazine, a cardboard base, double sharpened pencils (for axles), glue, tape, rubber bands and plastic wheels; it ran in light and stopped in shadows; like a cockroach.)   However, this time ~30 years later, the silicon promptly shattered when I tried to solder wires to the + and - sides of it.  I picked the largest remaining piece and tried to heat it as little as possible to solder but it shattered again.  So, for now, that's all for the solar component.  I still had the vibrating motor, so I hooked it up to a 1.5 V AA battery, and rubber banded them together.  It vibrated and slid around on the table top.  I needed something to add to it.  I thought about the toothbrushes we had ... but then remembered something about a drawbot (on Teacher Tom's blog that referenced "get your mess on", and at "Filth Wizardry" that commented there).  So I used more rubber bands to make a little pencil tripod... 

Above you can just see the vibration motor under the AA battery which is banded to the pencil tripod.

Another view.

T pointing out the rabbit ear configuration. 

I cut out a rectangle of cardboard and taped a sheet of paper to the back.  The cardboard is to keep the vibrodrawbot from going off the edge of the sheet.  It ran for a while a scribbled out a design.

At the end we had a masterpiece, already framed to hang up on the wall!  T was unimpressed, he said "so basically you made a robot that can't do anything but scribbles; even [F] can do that."

Undeterred I am thinking of future modifications.  An on/off switch, pens in different colors, ...