Braun Bot 20

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Inspiration

Braun Bot was made from our curiosity towards doing projects with Arduino. We have always wanted to do a hardware project before and BeachHacks was the perfect opportunity to really push ourselves and create a product. We were really inspired by vintage retro aesthetics as the Adafruit 3.5 display screen really reminded one of our team members of an old TV.

What it does

Braun Bot is a companion robot that has three different modes depending on your mood: happy, sad, and bored. When the screen first turns on, you are greeted with a smiling face, and then redirected to a selection menu where you can choose how you're feeling. Through your choice of selection, a different version of Braun will show up on your screen and accompany you.

How we built it

We built it using an Arduino Uno board, Adafruit 3.5 display screen, a breadboard, connection cables, and buttons

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a lot of challenges due to having very limited knowledge of Arduino and just hardware in general. The most troublesome issue was hardware. It would sometimes not connect, glitch or run the program incorrectly and we spent most of our time figuring out the issue and troubleshooting it. It was quite frustrating as it was working fine in the beginning, but we were able to fix it due to existing documentation and asking the IEEE members for help. Next was using image assets. We unfortunately did not have an SD card to store our assets, and therefore had to convert each image to byte sized arrays. It was very time consuming and we had to switch between several platforms.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite the many challenges, we are very proud that we built a hardware project. It was something none of us had done before and we used little to none AI. Most of our code, assets and troubleshooting was human-made and we very much cherish what we have accomplished.