BRICKSOFT.ORG

Let's measure some power :)

DESCRIPTION

This is a school group project, we had one week to make a project with zero budget and very few guidelines.
With my friend, we decided to make a robot out of scraps we could find in the old electronics component cabinet as well as the literal trash from the university.

Final product

demo_photo

CHASSIS

We used the metal from an old workbench, cut it using an angle grinder, and made our base chassis using a hammer to shape the final form.
The top part is a very thick cut of acrylic found in the dumpster, the shape was obtained after heat dending the sheet with a heatgun borrowed from the mechanical engineering department.
We used some hard drives magnets and glued them to the acrylic and this made our two halves stay together.

MOTORS

The motors and gears were obtained from an abandonned robotics project from previous years, these were heavy duty 12V DC motors.
For driving the motor, we had access to a L293D dual H bridge, we beefed it up by adding two small heatsinks.

HEATSINK

demo_photo

BATTERY

The battery also came from old electronics projects, and it showed, we had two batteries, both of them were on the verge of dying.
The batteries were lead acid so no need for an internal charger, this simplified the design.
Also, being lead acid, we could estimate battery percentage by measuring their voltage, we did this using a resistor divider and added a precision potentiometer for calibration.

CAMERA

In the begining we were supposed to have zero budget but we convinced our teacher to order an IP camera, he was the same person monitoring our other projects and trusted that we would complete the project and agreed.
Massive thanks !
So the camera was ordered and received on the last day of the project week, I did have trouble making it work because it was my first time manipulating mjpeg in JS.

AFTERMATH

Eventually it worked out fine, the motors have a lot of torque and the vehicle was pretty fast considering its weight (about 3kg).
The best part about it is the googly eyes and the camera on top which gives it the goofiest look !
The project was shown off a week later for the open days of the university, the teacher looked proud of our work.

Open days

demo_photo

Demo video

demo_photo

EDIT: IIRC the weird block wrapped in electrical tape is the camera power regulator, although I am not certain about this. There is also a dedicated GPIO for an external horn but this was banned by the teacher after only one use, the buzzer is now the horn, this makes me sad. O0 vas dedicated to a solid state relat for a motorcycle horn, such a shame…