A simple Halloween themed project to add some animation and sounds to a cardboard skeleton cut-out. A PIR sensor at the top right corner (somewhat hidden under a clump of fake spider web) detects movement and triggers a hobby servo that rotates the torso of the skeleton. The eyes are a pair of red LEDs and the sound effects come from a WTV020SD-16P sound module. The “brain” of the operation is an Arduino Nano. ...
Today I’m going to walk you through my experience trying to localize the source of a sound using Arduino. My goal with this was to add a feature to my robot that would make it more interactive and look more “alive”. Beta 1 What you normally see people doing, as an easy approach, is to measure the volume level from two microphones in which the amplified output is connected to the Arduino analog inputs. Whichever input is higher determines the source direction of the sound. ...
Daisy is an old “Discovery Kids” projection alarm clock turned into an autonomous obstacle avoiding bot. The brain is an Arduino Mini. Two small servos, modified for continuous rotation, are used for a differential drive and a combination of 3 infrared sensors (under the “skirt”) and 1 HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor (the “eyes”) detect obstacles. I used the built in piezo buzzer for the alarm clock to play some basic tunes and sounds when power is turned on. ...
I spent some time reading on accelerometers, gyros, sensor fusion, PID, optimized PWM motor control. I tinkered with the components I have for a while and then procrastinated for even longer. Finally, I can say that I have a prototype of a self balancing bot that shows promise. More fine-tuning is needed, and I plan to add a Bluetooth module to get PID controller data wirelessly, possibly to adjust the PID coefficients in real time and, hopefully to steer the bot remotely someday. ...
Project overview This is a differential steering robot that can be controlled from an Android phone via Bluetooth. The robot’s “brain” is Arduino Uno compatible board (an “Arduino on a breadboard”). The robot uses a JY-MCU Bluetooth module for communication with the Android phone. A custom Android app, created with the MIT App Inventor 2 essentially acts as a remote control, sending commands to the Arduino that tell the robot to move forward, reverse, stop or rotate. ...
Today I tested my first ever quadcopter, built as part of a recent workshop at the Vancouver Hackspace (VHS) . My initial test flight lasted a whopping 10 seconds and ended with a spectacular crash on the concrete parking lot in front of VHS, ...
An Arduino Uno controlling a small robotic arm that sorts balls in their respective containers based on the ball colour. A TCRT5000 IR sensor is used for basic colour detection. I’ve made some progress over the weekend. Check it out…
I recently bought the OWI 3 in 1 ATR (all terrain robot) kit from Amazon. What got my attention was its potential for hacking and re-use of its components. In the “Rover” mode the unit is pretty tightly packed. There does not seem to be much space to add electronics, or batteries inside, but they can be added on top. The front of the robot seemed a good spot to put the extra stuff, so I taped a 4 full AA battery pack as a test. The results were pretty good – the motor handles the extra load without a problem and the additional weight at the front actually helps the bot to climb over fairly tall obstacles with a vertical wall: ...
Experimenting potential configurations for a mechanical arm. Motor + screw as actuator. To do: – Stop motor when the clamp grabs something (without crushing it) – Add servos for 2 axis movement The planned steps for this project actually are: – Define platform – Locate the object – Move towards it – Collect – Sort – Locate dumping sites – Unload cargo according to dumping site
We held our first line following competition last week. We knew ahead of time that right angle turns may cause some issues, so we set up a few to see what happens. We did have some challenges, like you can see here: But at the end we had several clean runs and a winner: