Motorized Super Mario Bros. Piranha Plant

Name of Model: Super Mario Bros. Piranha Plant

Created by: Daniel Pikora (yours truly)

Found at: https://youtu.be/oJrjyQKZ1Y0 for now

Details: While I (Dan) continue to be largely absent due to personal issues (I'm now moving to a new state again), I have still kept building and kept attending events. At one such recent event (this year's BrickFair Alabama), I was interviewed by our friends at Beyond the Brick about my Super Mario Bros. Piranha Plant. While the mechanism still doesn't run smoothly enough for me to be completely happy with it, it's worked well enough to take to shows - but I've been avoiding documenting it online until I've had a chance to make it work better (in this clip, it's already lurching along at a slower speed and sticking a little). I'd like to revise it further to fix the motion problems and to try to capture more of a world from Super Mario Bros. - perhaps with a few more moving characters. This model debuted at last year's Maker Faire Orlando, which coincided with the 30th anniversary of the original release of Super Mario Bros. It also works out nicely that Piranha Plants were actually green back then (as compared to the red that's currently more common). Not that colors showed up on my classic Game Boy, anyway... I had originally planned on building this for BZPower's "Lights and Action"-themed convention circuit last year, but this took too long to get together and then still didn't work reliably enough to send off with someone else. You may still have seen it at last year's Maker Faire Orlando, Brickworld Tampa, BrickCon, BrickFair New Jersey, BrickUniverse Dallas, and/or the Orange County Public Library System LEGO Contest (in addition to this year's BrickFair Alabama, seen in the featured clip). Later this year, I plan on displaying it (at least) at BrickUniverse Raleigh, BrickNation West Friendship, Scouting For Bricks, BrickFair New England, and BrickFair Virginia.