Matt's Lab

My daughter enjoys inventing and creating. For a summer project, she designed and built a carrot cutting machine. Using littleBits and some household materials, I helped her construct a prototype based on her design. Lindsey's Original Design Mechanism Concept Sketch Materials dowel rods duct tape littleBits modules plastic knives cardboard box paperclip plastic carrots littleBits Schematic Modules 1 push button 1 servo motor (set to swing) 2 wire modules 1 power module 1 long LED Lever System Test Internal Components Test It Pushing the button on top of the box causes the LED to light up, showing that the machine is operating. Meanwhile, the servo pulls and pushes the lever system that causes the plastic knives to move up and down. The plastic carrots are sliced and diced!

The cloudBit module allows tinkerers, kids and grownups alike, to connect their littleBit creations to a smartphone. This turns your littleBits into an IoT (Internet of Things) device. After I received my cloudBit Starter Kit, my daughter and I tried out a basic circuit to communicate with each other between the two different levels of our house. Each littleBit has magnets on both ends of the module. This makes it easy for kids to build circuits. The modules snap together when they are arranged correctly. The magnets push apart when the modules are not arranged correctly and do not snap together. Here’s the basic circuit my daughter and I created to test out our communication device idea. Connecting the cloudBit to our router was easy using a smartphone and the littleBits cloud start website . After our littleBits cloudBit was connected to the router, we set up some rules (or recipes) with triggers and events using my IFTTT (If This Then That) acco...