TEXT AND PHOTOS BY VIRAAJ RAVJI OF THE GUINEA PIGS
Hi, I’m Viraaj and I’m a student from the Guinea Pigs class (The best class in my opinion). This week was a pretty successful class, from working in the garage to technical robot stuff.
Two weeks ago we started designing our boxes before carving them out on the Laser Cutter. Plus we had to cover the box with tape before cutting, to prevent char on the edges.
One week ago we started glueing the box sides together and placed rubber bands around the box to keep it together while the glue dry.
This week we took off the rubber bands and applied a coat of clear polyurethane,and then we all ended up with a wet box with drips of polyurethane, well I did.
Paul’s
Ritesh’s
Luka’s
Mine
Otto’s
Next we needed to work with our BugBot’s (mini robots) we made in term 3. We wanted to add a Ultrasonic sensor to allow the BugBot to sense objects. The Ultrasonic sensor looked like eyes for the robot.
We first added the Ultrasonic sensor on some perspex by screwing them on. Next we drilled some holes into the timber on our BugBot to screw the other piece of perspex and then mounted our sensor on there using the hot glue gun. And then as always the jumper wires to hook onto our arduino board on our bots. We then loaded code provided by Nigel into the BugBot which uses the Ultrasonic Sensor to detect an object ahead of the BugBot and change direction. We then had four BugBots with working Ultrasonic sensors.
Our next project was adding line following sensors under our bots.This was a little bit harder than the Ultrasonic Sensor just because of how fiddley it was to put together. There were these little pieces of plastic to put the line following sensors into. We then need to hook up the wires to the arduino board and add in the code. The one thing about the code was that we couldn't have the Ultrasonic Sensor and the Line Following Sensor both work at the same time, so we could only use either one on our bots for the time being.
