claw machine

8 Articles

Santa Claws: Sharpen Your Skills For A Good Cause

December 18, 2019 by 2 Comments

Want to do a bit of good this holiday season without leaving your couch or battle station? Well step right up and try your hand at Santa Claws, the charitable claw machine created by UK-based firm Liberty Games. For every toy you can maneuver to the chute, Liberty Games will donate money to Crisis, a national charity devoted to ending homelessness.

The machine is filled with special Christmas-themed stuffed animals that represent different cash values from £1 to £5. And these toys are doing double duty — after the holiday, they’ll all be donated to a good cause. In order to make this playable worldwide, Liberty used a Raspberry Pi, two Pi Face boards to interface the claw machine’s controls, and a Pi Face rack to everything together. They have the machine set on ‘generous’, so go have fun.

Has this rekindled a longing for your own claw machine? Yeah, us too. Here’s a full-size machine that runs on a Teensy.

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Hackaday Links: Christmas Eve Eve, 2018

December 23, 2018 by 17 Comments

The entirety of Silicon Valley is predicated on the ability to ‘move fast and break laws’. Have an idea for a scooter startup? No problem, just throw a bunch of scooters on the curb, littering and e-waste laws be damned. Earlier this year, Swarm Technologies launched four rogue satellites on an Indian rocket. All commercial satellite launches by US companies are regulated by the FCC, and Swarm just decided not to tell the FCC. This was the first unauthorized satellite launch ever. Now, Swarm has been fined $900k. Now that we know the cost of launching unauthorized satellites, so if you’ve got a plan for a satellite startup, the cost for an unauthorized launch is a bit more than $200k per satellite. Be sure to put that in your budget.

Santa Claws! Liberty Games would like to donate to a charity this holiday season, but you can’t just write a check. That’s not fun. Instead, they connected a claw machine to the Internet, and anyone can play it. Setting up a webcam was easy enough, but they also had to move the claw and press the button over the Internet. A Raspberry Pi came to the rescue.

Tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of Apollo 8, mankind’s first trip beyond Earth orbit. Now, using Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter data, NASA has reconstructed the famous ‘Earthrise’ photo taken by the crew. It’s in 4K, and we’re getting a great diagram of what pictures were taken when, through which window.

It’s that time of year again, and the 176th Air Defense Squadron is on high alert. This squadron, based out of Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska has the AWACS in the air, on patrol, just waiting for the inevitable. You can take a look at their progress here, and please be sure to keep our service members in your thoughts this holiday season.

Show off your sculpture skills with small bits of wire! Get the blowtorch out because copper work hardens! [Roger] can’t enter the Circuit Sculpture contest, but he did manage to give a body to one of the Tindie heads.

The Internet Of Claw Machines

May 2, 2018 by 8 Comments

Remote administration of machines is a very useful tool for all manner of commercial, industrial, and home applications. Now, it’s available for claw machines, too – thanks to [Code Your Venture Free].

The project uses an ESP32 board that includes a battery case on the back for a standard 18650 lithium battery that makes getting small battery powered projects off the ground much easier. You can find them at Banggood and AliExpress, but we’re not 100% sure that they’re kosher because they’re branded WeMos, but don’t show up on WeMos’ website or their official online retail store. Anyway, it’s a cute idea to strap a LiPo cell to the back like that. Let us know in the comments if you know more.

Back to the claw! An off-the-shelf thumbstick is then connected to the ESP32 which is programmed to send packets over the network to control the claw machine, which is wired up with its own network-connected microcontroller. It’s all wrapped up in the usual 3D printed case.

The one problem that the project doesn’t solve is delivery – how does the remote player, whether on the local network or online, collect their prize? We can only assume some cutting-edge form of drone delivery is the solution. It’s not the first remote claw machine we’ve seen, either. Video after the break.

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Play A Claw Machine From Your Armchair

November 19, 2017 by 18 Comments

Have you ever been seduced by a claw machine in an arcade, only to have your hopes of a cuddly toy dashed as it fails to hang onto your choice? Then you’re in luck, because now you can play to your heart’s content online. [Ryan Walmsley] wants you to control his Raspberry Pi-driven claw machine.

Hardware-wise he’s replaced the original 8052 microcontroller and relay control with the Pi and a custom H-bridge PCB. We particularly light the warning: “Highish voltage”, and we feel it should appear more often. There is some code in his GitHub repository, but we suspect it doesn’t have everything.

We had a lot of fun digging into the documentation on this one. From his initial thoughts through some prototyping and a board failure, to the launch of the online version and finally a run-down of how it all works, he’s got it covered.

Sadly the machine itself isn’t online all the time, it seems to be only online when [Ryan] is at home, so if you live on the other side of the world from his British base you may be out of luck. Fortunately though his previous live streams are online, so you can see it in action on a past outing below the break.

Of course what kind of swag do you load up in a claw machine like this one? On his Twitter feed we’ve seen tests of the aliens from Toy Story (who start their existence in a claw machine so quite fitting). The majority of items show in is recorded games — now numbering over 2000 — have been our beloved companion cube.

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Oh No! It’s The Claw Again!

June 12, 2017 by 7 Comments

[Ryan Bates] apparently really likes building claw machines. We noticed his latest build with a new PCB, but then we scrolled down and found other incarnations of the machine going back to 2015.

The laser-cut claw is interesting looking and the brains are an Arduino. You can see the action in the video below and there are plenty of older videos on the project page.

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Here Comes Santa Claws

December 24, 2015 by 4 Comments

Liberty Games in the UK was looking for a fun way to support charity for the holidays, and we think they succeeded. They decided to set up an arcade crane machine to run over the internet, with each type of toy snagged earning  a donation. Snag a bear, and they will donate £5 to St Mungos, a UK charity that works with homeless or at risk people. Snag one of the rarer Santa toys, and they will donate £20. It’s a great cause, and a nice hack. Behind the scenes, the Internet side of things runs on a Raspberry Pi connected to a PiRack and a couple of PiFace digital interface cards that are wired into the electronics of the crane machine so they could control the buttons on the machine from a Web interface. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to be running when we tried it, but hopefully someone will give the machine a swift kick shortly to get it going until the Hackaday traffic invariably brings it down again.

One of the interesting thing that they discovered while working on these hacks: they have a pay-out ratio that is determined by the strength of the grabbing arm. The owner can tweak this so that the arm does not grab very firmly, which means a dropped bear. Want to torture your friends with hopes of snagging the best stuffed animals?. Follow the example of this claw machine build all from parts on hand.

Full Size Custom Claw Machine Built With Parts On Hand

September 14, 2015 by 1 Comment

You know how it goes – sometimes you look at your social calendar and realize that you need to throw together a quick claw machine. Such was the dilemma that [Bob Johnson] found himself in during the run-up to the Nashville Mini Maker Faire, and he came up with a nice design that looks like fun for the faire-goers.

Seeking to both entertain and enlighten the crowd while providing them with sweet, sweet candy, [Bob] was able to quickly knock together a claw machine using mainly parts he had on hand in the shop. The cabinet is nicely designed for game play and to show off the gantry mechanism, which uses aluminum angle profiles and skate bearings as custom linear slides. Plenty of 3D printed parts found their way into the build, from pillow blocks and brackets for the stepper motors to the servo-driven claw mechanism. A nice control panel and some color-coded LED lighting adds some zip to the look, and a Teensy LC runs the whole thing.

Like [Bob]’s game, claw machines that make it to Hackaday seem to be special occasion builds, like this claw machine built for a kid’s birthday party. Occasion or not, though, we think that fun builds like these bring the party with them.

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