Line Following Robot

thingiverse

This is a line following robot I designed for the Zebra Explorers post. It's based on the same chassis as my mini Sumo robot. It boasts several key features, including: Controlled by a Raspberry Pi ZeroW Two analog reflection sensors A laser TOF distance sensor An AVR microcontroller for power management and analog/IR input Uses Python 3 for programming and C for driver libraries The bill of materials includes all the parts and pricing as well as sources. The cost when building 30 units was approximately $75 each. Instructions to set up the bot from a standard Raspbian install are included in setup.txt. If you prefer, there is an already set-up image available. See below for details. Instructions for building the bot can be found in Assembly.pdf. To communicate with the Pi, use ssh either over wifi or USB. The Zero will appear as an NDIS ethernet adapter when plugged into your PC. It shows up at 192.168.42.1, and the account is of course pi, with a password of SumoBot. After logging in, change directories to code/test. There you'll find some test code. sensors.py displays distance and reflection sensor values as well as battery voltage. motors.py can be used to test the motors or adjust center point pots. To turn on the bot, press and hold the switch for a second until the blue LED on the board comes on. To turn off the bot, press and hold the switch for a few seconds until the blue LED starts to blink. When the LED goes off, the bot is completely powered off. The battery is blocked by a FET so you don't have to worry about leaving it plugged in. If the blue LED starts to blink while running, that means the battery is getting low. The bot should shut down before the battery gets too low, but you might want to turn it off at that point, just in case. Prebuilt image A full disk image for the bot can be found at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1x3cDfR26dcHZn25fXI_K_bmpcQTh8dHZ/view?usp=sharing You'll need to go into code/AVR and run the command make prog. This will program the AVR microcontroller. Additionally, you'll need to set up the WiFi to your local access point. Instructions can be found at: https://jsconsulting.com/explorers/sumo/docs/Setup.txt