James

Hello, my name is James. An aspiring legend, I enrolled in a 6 week summer program sponsored by BlueStamp Engineering in which I completed two projects, one being a starter project and another being a main project. For my starter project, I constructed a voice changer. As for my main project, I built a robot that utilized its sensors to identify and turn to a different direction when it has reached the end of a surface so that it doesn’t fall.

My reflection is that while programming was difficult, building the robot chassis was the hardest part. Moreover, the tedious documentation sometimes got to me but I understood that it was necessary in the future and what I’m doing right now is preparing me for future careers in my life. Overall, my experience here was amazing, the people were great and the projects were fun.

I am Legend.

Hints & Tips:

• Keep an open mind; sometimes in order to get the right coding for your tiny wanderer you must mix different codes from many different sources that may sometimes have nothing to do the other.
• When drilling wider holes into your robot chassis if necessary, start slowly; if you drill a hole to fast you’re assured a crack, if not a complete break, of a piece of your robot.
• Be sure to keep your wiring in order so that you don’t get flustered. Also, it’s always good to make your robot look good by using rubber bands to tie wires together so that they aren’t everywhere.
• Placement and spacing is everything. The data being sent to the serial monitor from the sensors could get messed up if the sensor is too close to the robot.

B.O.M.:

Schematics of my robot:

The coding used for my robot:

#include <Servo.h>

  Servo yolo;
  Servo yodo;
  int pos = 0;

  void setup()
   {
     Serial.begin(9600);
     yolo.attach(9);
    yodo.attach(10);
   }
  void loop()
  {
      float IR = analogRead(0);
      Serial.println(IR);
      if(IR < 400)
      {
        yolo.write(0);
        yodo.write(0);
       delay(1000);
      }
     else if(IR < 350)
    {
      yolo.write(90);
      yodo.write(160);
      delay(3000);
     }
    else
   {
     yolo.write(179);
     yodo.write(0);
   }
}

I’ve recently finished my second milestone. What I had to do was program the serial monitor to control the servo motors of my robot. The way I went about doing this was finding the threshold of the data that the sensors sent to the serial monitor when it was on or off a flat surface. After understanding the threshold all I had to do was apply the data to the coding that I had typed in already.

In my video, I’ll be discussing my experience in doing the starter project.  The starter project made me realize that I truly enjoyed putting parts together and soldering them together. I believe that was my favorite part when constructing my starter project. But that has changed now that I’ve been working on my main project which is available at:

So far I’ve coded the Arduino Uno to make two motors move simultaneously as well as make the motors move forward and backward. I’ve also used IR Emitters/Detectors that show data on the Arduino’s serial monitor. I’ve acquired all the materials necessary to construct my Tiny Wanderer. At the moment I’m learning how to program using the Arduino programming language. Waiting for the go ahead to laser cut my Lexan board. My starter project video has been uploaded to YouTube.

Inspired by : http://www.instructables.com/id/Tiny-Wanderer-A-Table-Top-Robot/?ALLSTEPS