Frankenstein: The Boat

Inspiration

Halloween spirit as well as the ability to use dead items again. I was curious if I could build a contraption that could take the force supplied from the contractile motion of the frog legs to move a boat across the water.

What it does

Floats like a boat (eventually) and moves only powered by electrically stimulated frog legs (also eventually).

How I built it

Arduino controls the voltages to stimulate frog legs, which turn gears to turn propellers to move the boat.

Challenges I ran into

Originally successfully coded it with a FRDM KL25Z in ARM Assembly, but ran into issues deploying it to run without USB connections, so I switched to Arduino Uno R3. I downloaded and learned the Arduino programming for the first time in the last 3 hours. Creating the actual boat was also a huge challenge, as many materials I had did not fit together well. Originally, I had planned for a rope to go around the gears, but space constraints and the varying thicknesses of the gears I had available did not accommodate for that. Instead, I changed to a direct gear to gear connection, which meant I needed to provide an opposing tension to the pull of the frog legs. The hardening clay I had planned to use to create the pedals did not arrive, so I utilized wooden dowels and duct tape.