User:Hnaveed6416/ENES-100/Project 1-Mazie

Week0 Preferences
We are only doing 4 projects in this class which are, Model Railroad, Maze Solver, Fido, and Mazie. My list of preference on the projects from highest to lowest is Mazie, Maze solver, Fido, Model Railroad.

Week1 Narrative
Beruk and I are assigned to the Mazie project, which is using an Arduino and another chip called Parallax to make a little robot move through a maze, which is also created my us. If you go to the Parallax website they have tutorials that will help you step by step on how to set up the robot to the coding on the Arduino. i found out that there are many different ways to make this robot run though the maze but i started with the whisker but im going to try all of them to see which one work the best. You use 2 big metal whiskers in front of the robot and it tells the Arduino when ether of the whisker are touched then it sends a signal to the Arduino and then it moves its wheels depending on the input. Before i get started i need to get all of my parts, which are: 2 whisker wires, 2 7/8″ pan head 4-40 Phillips screws, 2 ½″ round spacer, 2 nylon washers size #4, 2 3-pin m/m headers, 2 220 Ω resistors(red-red-brown), and 2 10 kΩ resistors(brown-black-orange). I am only missing the 7/8″ pan head 4-40 Phillips screws and nylon washers size #4, which i told the teacher about and he will get it to me next class. i also got the big boxes to make the maze out of.

Week2 Narrative
WhiskersSince i didnt get all the parts needed to put the whiskers on the robot i skipped that step and started wiring the parallax. i just when to the tutorial and it gave me a picture of how to wire it all up...Parts list/Wiring list i also had to cut the 1/2" round spacer by hand and it dosent tell you how long it should be so i just made it 1.5". the 3-pin headers are the sensors that the whiskers are hitting and making it turn. I had to move the 3-pin headers alittle more apart because the whiskers were hitting both of them.

Week3 Narrative
I started on the coding for the robot to roam free with the whiskers on the Arduino. Here is the code.....Whisker Code. When the robot was given to me it was put on backward so i had to go back and change the coding form forward to backward. I also change the degrees for 120 → 35. In Arduino 800 is equal to 120 degrees so i divides and found out that 1 degree ≈ 6.66 in Arduino code. I also change the backing up time by half so it dosent hit any of the walls.

Week4 Narrative
I presented the project to the class and in the Engineering seminar to got other class mates input on some problems i was having. One of the problems that i had was that the robot couldnt run without the USB cord, then mr Plotnick gave me some fresh new batteries which made the robot work fine. one problem that is still going on is if the whiskers hit the wall at the wrong angle then they start bending up rather then go back. to fix that the class suggested that we add some more wires for whiskers, reassemble the robot facing the right was so its closer to the edge so it has more reach. We were also planing on putting the IR sensors on it as well and have the robot slow down when it come close to a wall. the codding for the IR sensor can also be found in the Parallax tutorials page.