For Physical Computing 2, we’ve been discussing robots, so for an exercise we each built a robot kit to get a better understanding of how they are set-up. I put together “Herbie the Mousebot” from Solarbotics.
Herbie responds and chases light and also knows when it runs into things (because of the sensors on its tail and whiskers). Pretty quick exercise to build in class.
Using this as a starting point and using inspiration from the story of horses chasing carrots, I built a first prototype of my magnet chasing robot. I first did a drawing illustrating 2 full-rotation servo motors mounted to a PC board with a reed switch at the front.
I used an Ardweeny as the on-board microcontroller, wrote code in Arduino, and attached a breadboard to the cart for easy prototyping.
Here is a video demonstration of the robot responding to a magnet as well as a recent “angry” robot, both done during class time:
For the next class-time iteration, I shifted gears a little bit, and as opposed to doing another magnet-chasing-robot, I went with the “angry” robot. I cut the front corners of a perf board off to make two triangles, attached those pieces to two servos zip tied to the front. I then programmed an Ardweeny, bread boarded it, and zip tied a regulated 9-volt battery to the robots back.
Both of these robots were made in under 3 hours.