Cheddar Cheese Robot

thingiverse

Video in action: https://youtu.be/Yj91v6HAUrc This is my very first simple robot built entirely from discarded materials. It's left here as inspiration, mostly to show what can be done with a few leftovers. The board mount is specifically designed for those versatile Radio-Shack boards (the open-source files will be added once the licensing information is in place). The whiskers can be 3D printed and then carefully cut to size. All of this can be easily built on the affordable Printrbot Simple Metal. The motors used were robust gear motors from Solarbotics - https://solarbotics.com/product/gm2/. At its heart lies an Arduino Pro Mini (available at SparkFun: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11113). If I had to do it all again, I would definitely create a printed circuit board to simplify the connections; as it was, there were far too many wires. An L298 H-bridge component was used to drive the motors from the Arduino - check out this resource: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/315. As for solar sensors to detect light, they did enhance the robot's ability to navigate, but I soon found that disabling them improved performance; without them, the robot wouldn't bump into objects and got lost in circles much less often, actually leading to a lot more exploring. Instructions: Warning - ensure the robot base is cooled down before attempting to detach it from a heated bed or you may cause damage to the base.