Piranha

At first glance, it’s a charming Mario ornament. But hidden inside is a lurking threat—a fierce Piranha Plant just waiting to leap out and attack! Inspired by the legendary feud between Mario and the Piranha, our design brings this rivalry to life using sensors and motors. When someone gets too close, the flower snaps into action. It's playful, unexpected, and guaranteed to catch you off guard.

We all know that Mario and Piranha are enemy all the time and always wanna kill each other. So we designed a desktop ornament that looks like Mario from the outside. But inside this machine, there are hungry flower that can jump out at any time, attempting to attack all Mario fans.

We designed a Flower shape machine and looks like "Paranha" from Mario, combined with mechanical "useless machine" concept. The robot moves and "bites" when detecting a person approaching, using basic sensors and motors. We used the figure from game "super Mario" and the pictures is from Nintendo website.

We used rhino to build model. The model has three parts: outside shell, up-and-down actuator and biting mechanism (And sadly our printer is not good enough to print a delicate model, for example, we tried to print a mario head instead of this cylinder shell in the beginning).

Our model is 22 cm high and 7.5 cm wide. We use ultrasonic sensor to detect people’s distance and if anyone is closer than 10 centimeter, it will response. And we use light sensor to detect if anyone is trying to touch this model and the flower part will try to bite. And after our test, we found that light sensor can better response if the distance is smaller than 1 centimeter.

We used two motors, an ultrasonic sensor, a light sensor and //the 5 v power is enough for this design.

In the testing phase we use monitor to control the data read from all the sensor, and divide it to control response from different situations. For example we map light sensor data to a specific range like from 0 to 100, equal to dark situation to bright environment. After testing all the sensors and motor, we finished this final code.

Painting and playing with the cute little trick~