3D Printed Arduino Car

Enter a new world where SolidWorks and Arduino come together. Introducing the new 3D printed Arduino car with a fully 3D printed chassis, steering, lights, custom digital license plates, and more!

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Video Link

Here's the video link (I ran out of time to upload onto youtube and apologize for any inconvenience): https://drive.google.com/file/d/12Lo7Fes2iHrD4rkmsOUZJXszBF52nBjA/view?usp=sharing

Inspiration

We love using the design software SolidWorks. We also wanted to learn something new so we picked Arduino as a base for our design. As for the physical side, we wanted to create something mechanical that involved lots of moving parts so we quickly settled on the idea of a car.

How we built it

The car was built using SolidWorks and then it was 3D printed in the Watt Makerspace. While the car was printing, we coded functions using a Grove Starter Kit and a variety of it's components to get the digital license plate and lights. The brake lights we programmed with a button that acts as a "brake" and the red LEDs light up. The front headlight was programmed with a light sensor that turns on the headlight when it gets too dark.

Challenges we ran into

Firstly, some of the tolerances on the 3D printing caused our car to print differently than we would’ve liked and the 3D printing time and Makerspace hours also constrained us from being able to add more. Not many problems were encountered on the Arduino side except that we were unable to light the LCD BackLight to the color that we wanted. We even referred to code from other people on the internet, but could not find a solution to our problem.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud for learning something new. Seeing as how this was our very first Hack-a-thon and our first time working with Arduino, we felt very positive about the outcome and we both will consider doing it again in the future. We also met our goal of having fun while doing it!

What we learned

We learned about how the mechanics of car steering works and were able to integrate that into a 3D printed model. We also learned about how to use Arduino because this was our first time ever coding in it and we feel that we accomplished a lot.

What's next for 3D Printed Arduino Car

We want to be able to one day figure out how to get the LCD RGB display to work so that it looks sweet! We also would like to be able to motorize our car so that the steering and drive functions are automated instead of manual. We also would like to 3D print a cover (with car features of course!) so that our car looks aesthetically pleasing.

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