Moody Useless Machine

If you ever get bored of trolling the internet seeking inspiration for your next big project, try a YouTube search of “useless machine”. After a few hours of watching these pointless, yet hilarious creations, we’re sure you’re going to want to build one. Luckily for us, [Arvid] documented the design of his moody useless machine to get you started.

Why is [Arvid’s] machine moody? Well, to fully appreciate the emotional sensitivity of a useless machine, you first need to understand what it is they do don’t do. A one sentence explanation is all that is needed here; you flip a switch and the machine flips the switch back… that’s it. [Arvid] implemented a two servo system with a stand-alone Arduino, which allowed him to give his machine a “personality”. Sometimes the switch is thrown back quickly without argument, other times the machine throws a fussy tantrum.

Although the machine is useless, the electronics inside are anything but. To keep everything clean and innocuous looking, the machine is powered by batteries, so [Arvid] places the Arduino into a ‘sleep’ mode until the switch is toggled. The switch is configured as an interrupt on the Arduino, which when toggled, wakes the Arduino.  Once the Arduino is awake, it enables power to the servos via a power MOSFET, then everything’s ready to go; the machine makes its response and goes back to ‘sleep’. This was a great project, but believe it or not, things can get more useless, like with this advanced useless machine.

[via Hacked Gadgets]

32 thoughts on “Moody Useless Machine

      1. To me, it looked, at best, pseudorandom. The “dueling” ones were really kind of disappointing – the second one just echoed all of the first one’s moves.

        But the first machine I saw turn itself off was in the 1950’s. It didn’t have any smarts. The switch turned on the motor, and the mechanism sent out a little hand to turn off the switch, then retracted while the motor was coasting to a stop.

      1. Oh yea! I’m making one too! I was thinking about making the switch touch-sensitive, so that the box can anticipate you, or if hold it ON, the box will taunt you until you let go

  1. Someone should build one with more ways of turning off the switch like swinging a tiny baseball bat or hammer. Put a mirror on the bottom of the lid and bounce a laser off it which scans around to find the switch, then it brings out the normal pusher, baseball bat or hammer to turn it off.

  2. Hello. The Moody machine I bought elsewhere a long time ago gets stuck when pressing on the switch and does not retract. Is this due to low battery power or some other issue that I can troubleshoot? Any thoughts? Thanks,

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