The problem

Playing Roblox Beeswarm Simulator I needed to collect lots of pollen to fill my backpack. It was taking a long time to fill the backpack and I wanted to do other things in the meantime and not end up with a sore finger!

1st solution

I decided to use my playmobil submarine with a James Bond car in it to weigh it down to autoharvest pollen.

This was too bulky and taking up too much space on the table, so I thought of using my Makey Makey to build an auto clicker.

2nd solution

The Makey Makey acts as a basic keyboard when plugged into the laptop.  It is currently set up to do the arrow keys, space and left click.  To harvest pollen on Beeswarm you have to left click on your mouse.

Using some kitchen foil attached to earth and the ‘click’ on the Makey Makey I connected it to my laptop and this meant that I could autoharvest the pollen. I then built a holder for the set up using some of my Lego.  By clicking the left mouse button on the real mouse I could switch off the autoharvest.

This was still causing problems though as I had to come back every 15 minutes to my laptop as I wasn’t moving around the server would kick me off for being AFK (away from keyboard).

3rd solution

To stop the server thinking that I was AFK I needed to create something that would enable me to move around.  Again the Makey Makey and Lego was the basis for this.

Using a Lego motor I originally thought of attaching the earth cable to the part being moved by the Lego motor (not shown in the photos above), with foil at the end of the Lego rod hitting wires to the forwards and backwards ‘keys’ of the Makey Makey. The problem with this though was that the cable very quickly got twisted!

To improve on this I built the following:

Here there are no cables attached to the arm on the motor, but wires to the forward and backward ‘keys’ with a gap in between so the circuit would be completed as the Lego arm passed through the gap.

This works to allow the avatar to move forward, but there isn’t enough of a delay between forwards and backwards circuits to register the backward command, even with the motor on its slowest setting. I think I will adapt the design by moving the backward wires to the top of the circle that the rotor arm makes.  Watch this space for updates!