Electronic Butterfly on a Budget

We made a budget butterfly made out of cardboard and rope that can move with electronics. We made this to prove all of the doubters wrong, we used minimal and accessible resources.

The materials we used to make this budget butterfly were some spray paint (black, green, yellow, white, blue), chromebook, cardboard, rope, hot glue, scissors, sharpie, servo motor, circuit playground

Step 1 is pretty simple, all you have to do is get some cardboard and a sharpie to trace a butterfly. We laser-cutted wood butterfly wings to trace it onto the cardboard but this is optional.

Step 2 is also very simple, get some scissors and cut out the butterfly you traced.

In step 3, you need to find some rope and put a string on the bottom that connects to the sides and put a piece of string on the other side of the butterfly but on the middle and make it point up so you can tie it around something. Also make sure you hot glue or super glue the rope down onto the cardboard

Step 4 is the most simple, basically all you need to do in this step is just bend the line of symmetry so that the wings can flap easier.

Step 5 is the most fun, in step 5, you're gonna need some spray paint of whatever colors you want. Once you have your spray cans, you want to spray both sides of your butterfly of whatever color patterns you would like.

In step 6, you're gonna need some cardboard to cut out 2 antennas for your butterfly. After you have your antennas cut out, you will attach them to your butterfly with hot glue. After you have attached them, you will need some black spray paint to spray paint both sides of the antennas black.

Step 7 is the most complicated step, basically for step 7, you will need a circuit playground, some wires, a servo motor, hot glue, and a chromebook. When you have all of these materials you need to open your chromebook and go to Makecode.adafruit.com to set up your servo. Once you're on the website, you need to make it so button A on your circuit playground, moves 90 degrees over. Then you will need to make it so button B resets itself. After this you will need to attach your wires to the circuit playground from the servo motor. Then you will need to put in the circuit playground USB into the chromebook to download the code onto the circuit playground. Once the code is on the circuit playground and the servo can move, you will need to grab some cardboard to hot glue some cardboard around the servo motor as seen in one of the images. Then you will need to connect it to the bottom rope of your butterfly to make the butterfly wings move with the servo.

Step 8 is pretty simple, basically all you have to do is tie the top rope of the butterfly onto some part of something that is connected to the ceiling as shown in the image so that your butterfly can hang and make it look like it's flying.

On step 9, all you need to do is just push down on the bottom rope to help the servo move the wings and push the A and B buttons to make the wings flap.

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