Claw Machine

This claw machine was built for my sons birthday party. He wanted some robots and so I figured this would be the easiest to build. Besides, I have been wanting to build something like this for a little while and needed a good excuse!
This was built from quite a few different scrapped parts.
Parts that were harvested from Copy machines: two of the three motors, the power supplies, the limit switches, and the 24V solenoid coil.
The carriage itself is from a commercial printer that I modified to fit the claw machine. I had to make mounts for the carriage motor and the z axis motor and also mounting of the limit switches.
The Stepper drivers take in 24V and current limit to below an amp. This allowed to keep from adding heat sinks to the drivers.
The controller for this is a 16F870 PIC. I used asm to program as I am more comfortable with this style. It utilizes the Timer2 and PortB,0 interrupts to get the steps going to the stepper drivers and the push button to cause the claw to drop and try to pick up a prize. Also added was a wdt timer to prevent any lockups from happening.
The upright frame is made from raw aluminum angle stock and the top frame was made from some chrome table legs I had from scrapping.
The back aluminum panel was taken from some scoreboard scrap that was going to be tossed anyways.
The Claw solenoid is driven by a ULN2001A darlington array, it is what I had in the junk box and works good. I did add a kickback diode on the coil itself, as I did not want to have the pulse travel down the cables.
The wiring was some scrap I came across, like the stepper motors wiring is from a server racks communications side.
That is about all I can remember for now. If there are questions about this, ask in the comments and I will try to get them answered.
Thanks for looking!

[@PugsClawMachines]

Amazing machine!!

[@PugsClawMachines]

Didn’t think you would heart this but you did!! =)

[@MicheleMFerrario]

- Daddy what you gave me for my birthday? - Anger and frustration

[@christ1a2b3c]

Hay, very nice piece of work. Could you tell me how you build or bought that the claw itself. I'm building something similar for a school project.t

[@chimericdream2557]

Do you have a writeup for the build? I'd love to see some diagrams and a parts list for this. AMAZING build!

[@willbaden7563]

I have been thinking about doing a write up at some point. Also to publish the code behind it. Hopefully to get some suggestions/ideas about how to better code it.

[@chimericdream2557]

Will Baden Well I for one can't wait to read it.

[@WorldwideArcades]

@@willbaden7563 Have you done this yet?

[@willbaden7563]

@@WorldwideArcades Check out: hackaday.io/project/215-toy-claw-machine It has been decommissioned this past year. I had thought about making a smaller controller version of it with an Arduino. We will see where that goes.

[@VendingJunkie]

This is badness!

[@ClawChaos]

Sweet!

[@aidan8728]

I have that exact same song on one of my videos it called running mini might!

[@АлександрМачехов]

ЗДРАВСТВУЙТЕ СКОЛЬКО СТОИТЬ БУДЕТ ЭТОТ АВТОМАТ ЕСЛИ ВЫ ЕГО КОНЕЧНО ПРОДАВАТЬ БУДЕТЕ

[@mn123abc]

dad? is that you dad? are you my long lost father? by the way it's my birthday tomorrow, so you better get cracking

[@beepyegg1005]

whats the music?

[@sirtinley-knot2944]

it's called "weeg wok wig wok, a weeg wok wig wok"

[@willbaden7563]

Ok I have started documenting the project here: projects.hackaday.com/project/215-Toy-Claw-Machine