Lab - DC Motor - Bubble Blower Failure

Description:

My intention was to make an automated bubble blower, attaching a fan to the motor and having the fan blow out the bubbles. The fan would have been controlled with a pot, using the sample code given during last week's lab.

Long story short, I ran into a multitude of problems and I couldn't get my bubble blower to work. My biggest problem was that the different fans I tried attaching to the motor  weren't generating enough wind to blow a bubble out. I also tried to build a contraption to direct the wind down a more narrow path in order to generate a faster wind, but it still wouldn't work. And then I accidentally broke the motor by pulling too hard on the wire and pulling out the metal conducting loop along with it. 

I got another motor from Kimiko on Tuesday, and even though she gave me some good wiring advice on how to avoid breaking off the metal conducting loop, I ended up making the same mistake and breaking the second motor. SIGH.

At any rate, I've attached pictures of what I tried to do. It's sad that I can spend $3 at Target to buy a toy that does exactly what I'm trying to do, but I couldn't figure out how to build it on my own.

Items used:

• 1 pot

• Arduino Uno

• Breadboard

• Lots of cable

• Motor

• Contraption to direct wind

Code (I didn't do any alterations, this is just the example code given last week):

int potPin = 0;   // select the input pin for the potentiometer
int motorPin = 9; // select the pin for the Motor
int val = 0;      // variable to store the value coming from the sensor
void setup() {
  Serial.begin(9600);
}
void loop() {
  val = analogRead(potPin);    // read the value from the sensor, between 0 - 1024
  Serial.println(val);
  analogWrite(motorPin, val/4); // analogWrite can be between 0-255
}