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Homemade Claw Machine Pt. 1


dogcow

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At this point I've amassed a pretty large collection of old cranes. Mostly United Textiles and Smart cranes. I'm getting pretty frustrated by the limitations of the older cranes so I decided to try and hack together my own crane motherboard. Ideally this would allow me to drop in to any dc driven crane
and get it running.

Some of the goals would be adding percentaging features, bill acceptance & credit accumulation (for the REALLY old cranes that can only play for 25c), and easy auditing ( no more meters and math to figure a commission)


I started by buying an [url="http://store.makerbot.com/arduino-uno.html"]arduino microcontroller[/url]. This is a neat little microcontroller you can get at Radio Shack for $30.00, the software to program it is free, it uses a simple procedural language similar to C++ , so anyone who has taken high school level programming should be able to make it work. There is tons of information and support online. I also picked up a "motor shield" which allows you to drive
DC 12v motors with an external power supply. The problem is it only drives two motors , and the crane has i believe 6 motors. oh well ill have to figure that out later, the bigger looming question is how am i going to control the claw coil voltage

the first thing i wanted to do was connect the inputs, the joystick , drop claw button , and coin line. The problem is the arduino only has a handful of i/o pins. To get around this limitation i purchased a texas instruments [url="https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9519"]piso bit shift register[/url].

The shift register is an IC that can take a bunch of inputs from switches and return the status of them on one pin as a binary number. So my microcontroller can read 8 switch statuses on only one pin. plus you can chain the registers together to increase the number of inputs to your hearts content.

Once i figured out how to get that working using the board's built in 5v line (perfect for this project since coin mechs and controls run on 5v for most cranes) then the hard part came in....reverse engineering the crane.

I decided to use a united crane i was using as a parts machine because it fell off the truck being moved. It had no motherboard but a working control box and claw gantry.

It took about four hours but i was able to figure out most of the pinout of the 12 pin jamma style harness that goes into the board. if anyone wants it, let me know.

I started by connecting the "drop claw" switch, i coded the program to display "DROP CLAW" on my computer screen when the drop claw button is pressed. After some tinkering ...ok a lot of tinkering...success!

In the next few days i should have all the buttons hooked up to my stub program...then its on to driving the motors!

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCJ6F5Avtq8&feature=player_embedded[/media]

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