Concept
The concept came from the sunflowers in front of my home. They are always facing the sun from morning to afternoon by rotating themselves.
Flower-D is light sensitive and can rotate itself based on the location of light source. In this case, the input of Flower-D is the brightness of the light between different faces of the origami's "head". The output is the rotation movement which changes the direction of Flower-D to always face to the light source.
Technical Implementation
The main electronic components I used are a Arduino UNO, a 360 servo ls-3006, and two light sensors.
The tricky part for the code is to compare analog inputs from two light sensors and decide which direction the motor need to rotate. If the light sensor on the left get a smaller input than the right one, which means the light source is on the right, the motor will rotate the flowers to the right in order to get more light and vice versa.
I tried a hard time to make a sunflower origami, but embedding the light sensor into the origami is even harder because the origami only has a small openning.
I used a straw as the stem in order to hide the wire as well as making the stem strong enough to hold the origami.
This is the first iteration of Flower-D. I glued two origamis on the axis of the motor. However, I realized that when the motor turned over 360 degrees, the wires that connect the light sensors on top of the origamis will be tied together.
Finally, I came up with an idea to stuck the wings of the motor in the base and let the motor to rotate its body with the origamis and other electronic components.
This is the second iteration of Flower-D. I slowed down the speed of motor to avoid the origami be broken by centrifugal force.
How it works
I was using the flashlight of a phone camera as the light source. Flower-D was keep rotating in 360 degrees and try to face the light source.
