Kabeer_BSE_Project
Project maintained by BlueStamp-Engineering-2022 Hosted on GitHub Pages — Theme by mattgraham
Cleanatron: The Only Tabletop Cleaning Robot
| Engineer | School | Area of Interest | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kabeer | Saratoga High School | Electrical/Civil Engineering | Incoming Junior |
Final Milestone
My final milestone is the fully functional Cleanatron, my tabletop cleaning robot. The project is capable of cleaning a table, while not falling off the edges and avoiding crashing into items placed on the table. My greatest addition were the new sponges that I added to the back, on either side of the robot. They were challenging to secure, since sponges don’t work well with tape. Also, if the sponges were too wet, they would drag the robot and the motors would not be able to move. In order to detect the objects on the table, I am using an ultrasonic sensor that sends a very quiet whining sound that bounces back if it hits an object. The machine uses this to fogure out how far away an object it, and move away accordingly. However, the most complex and most exciting thing is the homemade IR sensors, which send beams from the IR LEDs. Then, the phototransistor next to it tracks if a beam bounces back, and if so, it knows that there is a surface below, but if not, then there is no surface. The robot uses this to know if any part of it is going to go off the table, and adjusts accordingly. While it all worked by the end, there were many complications along the way. For one, my power supply ran into mutiple issues. When I finished at first, I realized that my power switch was broken, so I tried to replace it. While the replacement worked, it also resulted in my power usplly becoming overloaded, nad my project completely failing. In a panic, I tried to remove any unnecessary wires, but this didn’t really help, but I added a wire converting the current from 9V to 5V, and removed any redundant wires. This ended up working, so I finished my project. This was great because I learned how to program with Arduino, how to wire machines and solder, and how to troubleshoot with many types of issues.
Second Milestone
My second milestone was my primary modification, and completely restructured the purpose of my robot. From a land-dwelling roamer, my robot became a tabletop wanderer. This was made possible with custom-built IR (infrared) sensors. These sensors were attached to the arms of my robot, and can tell whether or not a surface is nearby, and turns accordingly. This process involved a ton of trial and error, and the robot fell off the table many times. So far, there were 5 times where the robot fell and I had to use a sickening amount of superglue to put it back together, but the robot did work. Afterwards, I did a lot of finetuning, and the robot only got hung up whenever it was near the corners, and could accidentally fall off. I knew that if I spent a lot of time, the project would fix itself with tuning, but for now, I thought it was alright. This milestone was easily the most coding-heavy, and I learned about a number of functions that were completely unique to Arduino coding. For examples, the milllis() function allows you to create timed events without stopping the flow of progress, like the delay() function does, so I switched my code.
First Milestone
My first milestone for my Smart Robot was constructing and fine tuning the VKMaker Smart Avoidance Robot. The first step was constructing a personal PCB with a protoboard and some schematics. Unfortunately, I did not have much experience working with these barebones schematics, and I was completely lost. Even after a few hours of research, I did not understand the diagram at all, so I decided to use an Arduino Uno instead, along with some breadboards. As I was assembling the project, I realized that the provided 4-battery holder would not be enough power for all the sensor that I wanted to add. So, I decided to use a 6-battery holder, and had to hodge podge the project together. Afterwards, I realized that the servo was moving so fast that it was falling apart, so I used some delays and changed the angles so it looked in three different angles, and spent more time at them. The ultrasonic sensor detects distance and can tell how far away the object is, so I tuned it to get within 30 cm before it backed away, and the robot was fully functional on the ground.
Starter Project
My starter project was the TV-B-Gone by Adafruit. I chose this project because I wanted to learn about soldering and learn how transistors/capacitors work, since I had no clue what they did (I also wanted to turn off the TV when my sister was watching). The project was mostly soldering components into specific components to a printed PCB. Initially, I made some messes, but my first major hurdle came when I had to push the power wires through two tiny holes. I had to put a little bit of solder onto the wires and then stick them into the holes, but I put too much solder and the wires would not fit in. So, I decided to try to fit the wires in by heating the solder up and pushing it through, but I really just closed the hole in the board. This took a while to fix, and I realized the solution was too cut the wires shorter so that they could fit through without breaking, and then I soldered them in. I tested it at home with both a Sharp and a Toshiba, and it still worked. This project was cool because I could use it a lot of my daily activities, and it taught me a lot of skills that would be very helpful for my intensive project.
