Help with a Kinetic Sculpture

Mccaw

I'm building an audience interactive kinetic sculpture as a part of my undergrad thesis.

The sculpture is a large oak barrel that has a motor driven device inside which emits a knocking noise when the motion sensor is flipped.

I'm running into problems wiring the sensor. The part has been stripped from a wall mounted light purchased at Canadian Tire. There are two wires that ran to an LED light, which I want to connect to the motor, and two other wires that were powered off 3 AAA batteries. The whole sculpture plugs into the wall with a voltage converter that can change voltage from 0V-12V.

Originally, i had adjusted the voltage on my converter to 4.5V then attached the wires that ran to the batteries directly to the power source in series. The other wires that used to attach to the LEDs were wired, in series again, to the motor.

It didn't work.

Does anyone have any suggestions for alternate wiring?

If anyone is curious to see the kind of work i make, my portfolio is online at www.sarahmccaw.com

Thank you so much for your help

SPS-1

Your power adapter is DC, not AC, right ?
You don't have the positive and negative mixed up, right ?
If you put the LED back, with the power adapter as the source, does it work ?
Do you have a multi-meter to test if you are getting voltage at the output?
That motor better be a pretty small motor. An LED uses very little power. Its possible that device does not have the power to drive the motor.