Maker and developer Aula Jazmati has created a fun bubble machine project using the Raspberry Pi Pico. Jazmati has geared the project toward teaching children programming fundamentals like functions and conditionals so they learn while making something fun to play with.
According to Jazmati, the project consists of a plastic disc with holes that spin through a small trough of soapy water. A fan is connected to blow air through the bubble solution on the disc. You can experiment with different hole sizes and fan speeds to tune it right.
There’s plenty of room for modification in this project. You can use different bubble wand shapes and fan sizes to impact the performance of the bubble machine. There’s also room to experiment with other bubble solution recipes.
A Raspberry Pi Pico fitted with a GPIO expansion board from SB Components is the main board behind this setup. It connects to a Dual H-Bridge motor driver L298 board from SparkFun, responsible for driving a 12V DC motor. Using the bubble wand disc, an axial fan with a brushless motor is thrown in to supply the air necessary to blow bubbles.
The code is simple enough to grasp for beginners and is written in MicroPython. The application is responsible for turning the motor on and off and determining what speed to set the motor to. This speed is specified using a potentiometer module connected to the Pico via an ADC pin. The source code and wiring diagrams are on the official project page.
Overall, this project is fun for anyone who likes to tinker. You can always rig a similar system using recycled plastic, but you could easily take things further by 3D printing a custom bubble wand or frame with a built-in water trough.
If you want to see this Raspberry Pi project in action, you can watch a YouTube demo video. A full breakdown of the project’s construction is available at Hackster.
