Nov 30 2010

Den hjælpende hånd

Category: Lego,MindstormsSpiller @ 23:21

At the high school I’m currently attending to, a full week was assigned to a special project with the theme: “Robots – the helpers of the future”. Everyone was divided into groups for four (except us as our group had 5 members) and at the end of the week were supposed to have created a robot that, err, could do something I guess.

Of some obscure reason we suddenly started building a robot that was supposed to be able to stir the contents of a pot to help your cooking or something. Well, we didn’t question it and just continued…

There was just one problem, the school never taught us how to build a working robot… After asking the teachers we were given a construction set called GEARZ and about 1-1½ hour later we had this:

It surely was hilarious, we even had to tape it onto the table to prevent it from falling (due to epic unbalance)… After the day ended I created something out of Lego instead.

However I decided NOT to use a NXT. After all, this was school and the main subject was Electronics. So I took the old RCX motors and sensors instead which are much easier to hook up with some circuit. For this project we used an Arduino board to control it.
Features:

  • Can stir or whip the contents in a pot
  • Can register the temperature and affect the speed of the stirring based on this
  • Can automatically turn on if you start a jet engine beside it. (Badly adjusted sound sensor…)
  • Can stop if you press a touch sensor twice

Photos:

There were two contents in this project, the teachers favorite was given a price (paid visit to a local restaurant) and the visitors favorite was given a price too (cinema tickets) as this whole thing was a giant PR stunt for the school….
Of some reason we actually managed to get on a shared first place for the visitors favorite.

Credits:

Ideas: The full group (5 members)
Construction: Me (took around 2×5 hours, I can’t believe I used that long for so little…)
Electronics design: the group members that receive electronics education (3 members including me) + some kind helping people from a university.
Programming: 50% by me, 50% by the 2 others (And no, the programming isn’t worth mentioning…)

Leave a Reply