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RedBull Arduino Controlled Golf Robot
Inspiration
We pulled inspiration from design of robot wars robots, and were focused on simplicity: simple goes a long way.
What it does
The robot moves forward, backward, left and right as well as has a spinning mechanism that is attached to an arm that makes contact with the ball upon pressing a button. The movement of the robot depends on the analog input of the joysticks and from that input it goes into an if/else if loop that will make the robot move. The code will also have an if button is pressed to make the rotating mechanism start.
How we built it
The chassis was given to us and the wiring was done by the team as well as the coding of the robot. The idea behind the arm was to make the most dense contact surface possible in order to obtain a greater force from the impact with the ball. This was achieved using a cut RedBull can, duck-tape, popsicle sticks, and hot glue. The can was folded over itself multiple times and compacted into a small prism, taped, and then stuffed with wood shards before being hot-glued to popsicle sticks that held the structure. We also hot glued cans of RedBull to make the body of the robot.
Challenges we ran into
The biggest challenge we ran into was making the robot move forward and backward after moving to the 3D printed case joysticks. Moreover, the robot kept turning to the right by itself and we had to fix that issue. To help us face challenges like these in the future, we will plan by taking into consideration possible problems and debugging time.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We learnt how to use C++ on the spot we had no knowledge of the language before the Hackathon and we never used a breadboard in general.
What we learned
We learnt how to use breadboards, as well as to write code in C++ and how to use an Arduino. Additionally, we learnt how important it is to invest time in making a plan, and will definitely keep doing so in the future.
What's next
We plan on doing more hackathons in the near future. We had a lot of fun doing the FACTORY Hackathon.
