How This Damn Idea Popped Up

So there I was yesterday, wrestling with this ridiculously wobbly shelf in my workshop. Smacked my knuckles good, and while I was hopping around cussing, my eye landed on the dusty kid’s dance pad stuffed in the corner. Something just clicked. What if… I could make this thing control something useful? Like, maybe tell a piece of wood how to move? That “Engineer Timber” bit started buzzing in my head.

Gathering the Junk

First things first, gotta see what junk I’ve got lying around. Rooted through the garage like a racoon:

• The Victim: That old foam dance pad, crusty but the buttons felt okay.
• The Brain: Snagged an Arduino Uno kit my nephew left behind, still in the box thank god.
• The Muscle: Found a small DC motor from a broken DVD player. Perfect.
• The Timber: Just a scrap piece of 1×2 pine, nothing fancy.
• Other Crap: Some jumper wires, a breadboard, a basic motor driver board (H-bridge thingy), and a 9V battery that hopefully wasn’t dead.

Laid it all out on the workbench. Looked like a garage sale reject pile. Okay, good start.

Cracking Open the Dance Pad

Flipped the pad over. Cheap plastic clips. Pry, snap, pry, snap – felt good destroying something carefully. Inside? Just four big rubbery dome switches, one under each arrow panel. Simple. Peeled back the layers to get to the wires connecting them. Snip snip. Now I had four loose wires and a common ground wire dangling. Labeled them with tape: UP, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT. No way I’d remember later.

Connecting the Wires & Making it Move

Fired up the Arduino kit. Plugged the Uno into my laptop, got that little green power light. Relief. Opened the software thingy.

• Hookup Time: Plugged the dance pad’s UP, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT wires into digital pins 2, 3, 4, 5 on the Arduino. Ground wire? Went to the GND pin. Easy.
• Motor Control: The motor driver board got plugged in. Power from the 9V battery to the driver. Motor wires to the driver outputs. Driver control pins hooked up to Arduino pins 6 and 7 (direction) and pin 9 (speed, using PWM because it sounded cool).
• The Timber Part: Taped a little plastic arm I cut from a yogurt cup onto the motor shaft. Taped my pine scrap to that. It looked stupid and flimsy. Exactly what I wanted.

Writing the Glue Code (The “Engineering” Part)

Opened a new sketch. Started typing lines:Hit upload. Held my breath. Saw the little light flicker… done.

The Big Moment (Sweating Bullets)

Unplugged the Arduino from the laptop. Plugged the battery into the motor driver. The Arduino powered up via USB… crap, forgot! Yanked the USB, Arduino went dark. Brain fart. Plugged the 9V also into the Arduino’s power jack this time. Green light on. Okay.

Carefully stepped onto the dance pad. Pressed the UP arrow with my toe. The motor WHIRRED! The little plastic arm jerked, the timber scrap lifted! YES! Pressed DOWN. It lowered! Did the speed wobble? Sure did. Was the movement precise? Not at all. Was it making wood “dance” by moving up/down based on my pad steps? Hell yes! That tiny scrap of pine was dancing, baby. Sort of.

What It Actually Looked Like

Picture this: a dude standing awkwardly on a kid’s toy, staring intently at a breadboard mess sitting on the floor. Wires everywhere. A tiny motor straining, attached to a floppy piece of wood jerking up and down maybe an inch. All powered by a 9V battery that smelled suspiciously warm. It wasn’t graceful. It was more like giving a stick a seizure with your foot. Pure engineering timber elegance. Damn near perfect.