Hands-free Baby Bouncer

Bouncing our new baby boy, Paxton, while working from home sure has made me great at typing with one hand. But, my lack of bouncing consistency is not Paxton's favorite thing and also limits my productivity. So, I built a hands-free baby bouncer with a cheap microcontroller, a standard continuous servo and a USB battery pack in about an hour including tinkering time.

NodeMcu Mini D1 ESP8266 ($3 each, https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B081PX9YFV/ref...

Standard continuous servo (~$5 from many places)

USB battery pack or USB wall

Tape

Zip ties

Superglue

1. Solder the three wires of the servo to the controller. I picked pin D4 on the controller to control the servo.
2. Create an offset weight using a few bolts and nuts. I used a 3"-long 5/16" bolt with 6 nuts, a smaller 3"-long bolt, some zip ties and a little superglue.
3. Connect the offset weight to the servo using a standard servo horn with zip ties and a little more superglue.
4. Tape the controller to the servo (any type of tape should work), creating one assembly.
5. Attach the servo-controller assembly to the baby bouncer with two zip ties after cutting small holes through the baby bouncer's fabric.

1. Code the controller via the Arduino IDE (https://www.arduino.cc/en/software/). The code I developed is attached as a file above.
2. Fine-tune the motion of your offset weight by changing the speed, direction and timing of the servo to create an effective bounce. You might need to add or remove weight from your offset weight, but I didn't have to.