Cake Poppers

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I have to admit I'm still a bit bewildered by some of these crazy cake contraptions. In this instance, these cake popping stands are used to make gifts 'pop' out of the middle of cakes. For an upcoming exhibition I was asked to motorise two of them so they can be seen going up and down automagically all day long. After a few tweaks and a redesign I ended up using non captive stepper motors pushing TR8 rods up and down. The whole thing uses a simple stepper motor driver and who know the Wemos D1 would be my preferred micro simply because of it's convenient mounting holes. The only other component is a 7805 regulator to supply the 5V to the Wemos board.




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