Samuel C.

Hi, my name is Samuel and I’m a rising junior at Trinity School NYC. My starter project was an electronic dice that shows different dice combinations when it is tapped on a table. For my main project I chose a gesture controlled robot. This project caught my attention because it gave me a platform to work on programming, which was my goal coming into Bluestamp, but it also required a fair amount of mechanical engineering.

Engineer

Samuel C.

Area of Interest

Software Design and Mechanical Engineering

School

Trinity School NYC

Grade

Rising Junior

Final Milestone

To complete my project I combined what I did in my first to milestones with my servos and motors. One of the problems I had to figure out was how to get 4 flex sensors to control both the motors and claw the way I wanted. I chose to add a switch to my design that would control whether the flex sensors controlled the claw or the motors. In doing this I sacrificed my ability to control both the motors and claw at the same time, however by doing this I retained significantly more control over my claw.

My Code    My Materials

Second Milestone

At this point in my project I just overcame two different obstacles. First I made the flex sensors, that previously controlled the servos, the capacity to also work the motors. I also was able to finally get my two arduinos to communicate via nrfs which allowed them to talk remotely. Although I didn’t have much trouble getting the motors to work with the flex sensors,  I had a fair amount of trouble with the wireless communication. In fact I switched to nrfs after I was unable to get my original radios, xbees, to work.

First Milestone

At this point in the project I have gotten the robotic arm to move based on values from the flex sensors. In order to accomplish this I mapped flex sensor values from 0 – 100 this made them easier to use in conjunction with the servos, this adjustment helped because all the flex sensors now used the same scale where as before the number outputs on different flex sensors were slightly different even at the same position. I also ran into some trouble when I assembled my claw. I had almost no trouble getting the servos to work on their own, but when I attached the servo to the claw it would stop working. I was able to fix this issue by changing one of the parts of the claw so the gears were lined up.

Starter Project

My first project will be an electronic dice that is “rolled” by tapping it on a table. The way it knows it has been activated is with a piezo sensor in the base of the die. The piezo sensor is made of a metal whose protons and electrons are arranged in such a way that they have an overall neutral configuration; however, when put under pressure or strain the molecules move to opposite poles thus creating an electric field. That tap is translated into a LED display in a PIC unit that is connected to the piezo. The PIC receives an analog measurement between 0 and 1023, which it represents as a 10 bit value. The PIC then takes the last 3 bits, limiting the number of possible values from 1024 to just 8. Those 8 values range from 0 – 7, then a check is done so if the PIC gets a 0 it is changes it to a 1, and a 7 gets turned into a 6. Once it has a 1 – 6 value the PIC lights up the corresponding LED’s in order to display that number as it would be seen on a die.

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