m m electronic slot machine candy dispenser

Here is my first iteration of this idea in action: You just load candy into a PVC pipe mounted at an angle and block the end with a fan blade that can be moved by a motor. The idea is actually pretty straight-forward. Then, right as I was about to give up for good, my wife gave me a great suggestion: use a fan.

Delivery Mechanismįor months, I pursued an idea that just didn’t work out, trying to fine-tune something that just couldn’t work (you can see some of the videos and images of the failed design in the gallery below). The real challenge, the thing I spent the majority of my time on, was designing a physical mechanism to reliably and consistently deliver the same amount of candy every time it’s activated. But if you like visuals better, skip to the gallery to see a visual record of my progress.Īs a software developer, the hardest part of this whole thing was designing and creating the physical components – that’s all the physical parts, not just the circuitry. If you’re interested in the details of how it works (it’s super neat, btw!), read on. In this post, I’ll break down the steps I took to create this machine. What if I automated the whole candy-giving-out process and sort of turned it into a game? After a full year of designing and building, I finally finished this machine to do just that.

Watching how much the kids loved the novelty of candy being dropped through a pipe sparked an idea for me.

Since the pandemic was still going strong, this allowed them to give out candy while staying distanced from others. Of course, we couldn’t stay at our house and face trick-or-treaters with no candy, so we decided, instead, to go for a walk.Īs we walked on Halloween night, one thing we kept seeing was folks sitting on their porches dropping candy to kids through PVC pipes.

Our neighborhood is very popular on Halloween, so last year, we found ourselves completely under-prepared when we ran out of candy within an hour.

M m electronic slot machine candy dispenser