Turns out that blogging is quite hard.  I’d been quite convinced when I started this venture that I’d blog about every robot I built and then occasionally in between time, whenever I had interesting thought.  Apparently that’s not the case.  Since July, I have quite successfully built a further four robots which are currently lying scattered around my flat frightening the cat.  I have, however, singularly failed to write about them in this time.  I’ve sat down stared blankly at my wordpress editor a couple of times, and come up with a multitude of excuses such as “I have no photo’s” or “I’ve not finished tuning it properly yet”, but in reality I’ve just not been able to think of anything to say.

I hope to rectify this today.

To catch up on the past 5 months of robot building I’m gonna give a quick overview of my menagerie of robots over the next few days.

Two weeks after completing Herbie the mousebot, I built a line follower.  He was a very simple line follower, but quite an order of magnitude more difficult to build than the mousebot.  There was a need for sawing, gluing, screwing things in and the result was far less professional looking than the kit style that Herbie had been.  In this respect I feel that Herbie was definitely the right place to start as it taught me things like soldering and how to bend and manipulate the parts on something which did not also need to have the main body board hand measured and cut.

Almost finished line follower (better photo to follow)

Once built it became obvious that the line follower had a major flaw, it was not balanced on it’s wheels and this meant that the front of the bot would rest on the floor and be pushed along by the motors. This was a problem largely because the front of the bot was where all the sensors were and having them dragging on the ground not only prevented the photoreceptors from picking up the bounced back light from the LEDs, but being nothing but receptors on the end of very thin, maleable wire, caused them to bend back on themselves and no longer be positioned correctly.  In order to resolve this issue, I glued a plastic measuring spoon to the base of the bot to support the front.  This solved the problem, but the spoon was rather too large and the front is now higher in the air that ideally it should be.

Problem number two on the line follower was largely our own fault.  Despite the instructions quite clearly stating that the line follower followed black lines on a white background (although there is a “reverse” mode that allows it to follow white on black), we assumed that it would be enough to run it following a black line on a beige surface.  This worked only intermittently, regardless of how many times I retuned it and I felt somewhat disillusioned.  It was only my second bot and I’d built a duff.  I got rather disheartened and didn’t build another robot for nearly 2 months.

As I found out later, the bot actually worked extremely well when run in the correct environment, but perhaps we’ll gloss over that for now shall we?

Tomorrow, The Turbot Tumbling Robot; velociraptor of the robot Jurassic Park