It has been quite a learning experience
showing students how to build robots from scratch. They are engaged
and feel empowered. One of my goals is to show my students that with
a bare minimum of specifically needed components, like an Arduino
board and a couple of continuous servos, you can create a robot with
things around your house. As long as you can keep track of where all
the wires go you don't even need the breadboard. One could just twist
all the wires together, tape four double AA batteries together and
there you have it, a robot.
Everything you need to learn is online.
One great place to look is on instructables.com where there are a
variety of technology projects others share with the world. This is
where I learned how to wire our Arduino robots and to program it to
move around. This site provided the diagrams, video, and code. What I
did was use this knowledge and modified it to accommodate for use in
my classroom. There are many other examples that will help me add to
the basic robot construct.
One such addition is building a sensor
from scratch. They are whiskers placed in front of the robot, like
bumpers. They trigger the robot to move in a different direction when
bumping into an obstacle. During class we used a wire hanger to make
the bumpers and it worked. However, this was not the ideal material.
It turns out that twisted wire, five strands of hardware wire, works
the best. For some reason this tends to be easier to work with while
also having the consistency of keeping its shape. The bumper was
attached to the front of the robot and two posts were mounted to the
front as contacts. As the whisker bumps into an obstacle it makes
contact with one of the posts therefore completing a circuit that
sends a message to the Arduino board which in turn tells the servos
which direction to turn. This could be a random or a specific
direction.
I could go into more detail, but I
think it would be much better for those who are interested to go
right to the source. Here it is:
I did find an error in the code
however. I am going to enter the correction on the next post.
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