I also love robots! This is the start of my collection. I also have an Omnibot that works, but is yellow from sun damage. After I build my dollhouse elevator I plan on painting it and adding some fun functions.

Anne

Oooops, I just realized that my last sentence wasn't very clear - I plan on painting the Omnibot, not the dollhouse elevator!

Thats some dollhouse very impressive

Are you going to have lights in every room? and how are these going to be controlled EZ-B might be the easiest way to go if you want full (mini) home automation.

I think I would put a small magnet on the lift and a reed relay on each floor that switches in a resistor all wired in parrallel. The resistors would be different values and you could read them through on ADC port connected to the EZB. So if the ADC port reads 10 you are on floor 1 and 20 floor 2 etc. This cuts down on wiring and problems with cables or chains stretching

Diagram added. There are loads of people on here who can write the EZ-B scripts up for you just another idea to mull over

For doll safety I added 2 top and bottom limit switches but not strictly needed

Hi winstn60,

Thank you for the diagram! In your message you highlighted the EZ-B, but the link took me to a page that shows a complete kit. Do I need the complete kit, or just the EZ-B board?

Also, is the Continuous servo one that turns continuously as opposed to the one that servo City suggested, which has 3.5 revolutions? Here is a link to the one they suggested:

Servo

I don't know anything about how to wire this system up, but I'm very eager to learn.

I would like to wire the dollhouse for lights, but haven't figured that part out yet. The dollhouse is built from pieces of 4 Playmobil Victorian Mansion dollhouses that I combined to build my multi level house. The Victorian mansion dollhouses are discontinued, so I find used ones on eBay. Playmobil made lighting kits for the houses, but I don't know if the light kits will work for my house since it is much larger than the original design. If you have any ideas about how to add lights I would be interested!

Thanks so much,

Anne

Probably for this application just the EZ-B board but you will then also need a power supply and some connecting leads.

Yes as its a fairly long elevator shaft a continuous rotation servo not one thats limited to 3.5 turns you could use a geared motor with slow enough rpm they are quite reasonable from Solarbotics but a servo has easy mounting options and is an easy option with the EZ-B. The speed of rotation will be the crucial thing you dont want a high speed elevator! a large pulley wheel would help. Probably needs a bit of experimentation

Reed relays come in lots of different packages and some with an operating magnet. I like the small glass ones as you can actually see it operating

The EZ-B board can drive LED lights directly and some are very bright. You can get wide angle, coloured and even versions that change colour they can be very small indeed. It would just take on cable from the LED to the EZ-B board. You just need to work out the number of rooms you need to light One EZ-B as a maximum has 20 ports for various uses so say 18 lights and one lift servo and one sensor port to find where the lift is. Or some other combination

This all of course needs a PC/Laptop of some sort to drive the EZ-B board and do the programming

Glad your eager to learn! at some point you'll have a Eureka moment and it will get easier

Keep us posted with progress

Neil