It’s Halloween night, and that means kids everywhere will be heading out to trick-or-treat. Most of those treats will be handed over or plucked from a bowl, but not at the house of one highly-skilled Lego builder.
That’s because Jason Allemann decided to create the amazing contraption you see here. It’s a Halloween vending machine! All a trick-or-treater has to do is tap one of the buttons on the base and the machine springs into action.
When activated, one of four motors (one for each row) whirs and conveyors guide the candy bars forward until gravity takes over and they drop into the Lego beast’s delightfully ferocious mouth.
Behind the scenes you’ll find a Mindstorms EV3 unit and motor running the show. It doesn’t have a very heavy workload in this particular build. Each button is attached to a lift arm.
When a button is pressed, the far end of the lift arm activates a touch sensor. That tells the EV3 to activate the motor in the corresponding row and deliver the selected treat.
Jason also coded in a 2-second delay. That brief pause prevents button mashing from causing problems because only the first press will trigger a dispenser motor. It also makes it slightly more burdensome for overzealous types to empty the machine before anyone else gets a crack at the candy.
When it does come time to reload, the process is simple enough. The spider and the skeletal thumb need to be shifted out of the way and there’s a USB cable to disconnect (it sends power from the EV3 to a LED light bar). After that the lid lifts right off and a fresh supply of candy can be stuffed into the conveyors.
This is just one of Jason’s numerous amazing Lego creations. Be sure to head over to Flickr and check the rest, from kinetic sculptures to a fully functional mechanical keyboard!
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