User:Jdassoulas/ENES100/Project1

My Instructor's user page which points to this.

Week0 Preferences
My group decided on doing the Arduino Robot with Multiple Behaviors project

Week1 Narrative
The first week we discussed and decided on what we want our robot to do. We decided that we want it to avoid obstacles and also locate the darkest place in the room, move to it, and light up a lightbulb. We did alot of research online, figured out what parts we need, and found a good tutorial on how to make an obstacle avoiding robot with arduino. And we also started creating a slideshow presentation of our project.

Week2 Narrative
This week our group tried to gather as many parts that we would need, and then plan out a design for our robot. We had several ideas on how we will get the robot to turn. One idea was to have one motor in the back controlling two wheels, and one motor in the front to control the steering. The other idea was to have two motors on two wheels in the back to control the steering. (one wheel goes backward while the other goes forward to turn), and have a wheel that can just go any direction in the front. We decided on the second idea, and we are going to use a ping pong ball as the free-rolling front wheel. After a lot of searching we finally found two identical continuous DC motors, and we pulled two wheels off of a RC car. For the the body, we decided to use this styrofoam-like material instead of the body of an rc car because we can modify the styrofoam-like material much easier than the hard plastic rc car shell, and the styrofoam is lighter. The only problem we had was attaching the wheels to the motors, but John found a solution. The next step is to learn how to wire it to the arduino and program the motors.

Week3 Narrative
I decided that we were just not acting on anything yet, so i grabbed a motorshield and put it on the arduino and decided to figure out how it works. I did alot of research and figured out how to wire the motors up to it. After that I spent a long time trying to figure out how to program the motors to run. Check out our group page to see more information on that. John got the motors connected to the wheels and then our group just got inspired and we got the robot moving forward with the motors and wheels attached to the body. Our next step is to figure out how to wire and program the ultrasonic rangefinder.

Week4 Narrative
On week 4 I soldered the pin header to the MaxSonar Sensor, I also figured out all of the arduino code for the robot. I also soldered the power supply and wired the robot all together, temporarily to see how it ran.

Code and Sensor