Project S.T.e.v.e.n.

Inspiration

Imagine if you were permanently trapped in your room; never able to feel the sun, or see the light of day. At first, that might not seem too bad, but imagine your room was completely empty, void of all joy and life, surrounded by windows, and unescapable. Now imagine if one day, you were shoved into a bag and brought far far away...all the way here to MCST. Your tank is now hooked up to a robot, and your life is changed forever. You might still be stuck in this tank, but your tank can travel the world. All you have to do is move, and your tank will move with you. You, a fish, don't need to have lungs to see the world in all it's glory! All you need is an S.T.e.v.e.n. and your dreams can come true. Japan, Paris, Bahamas, Hawaii, Florida, France, The Maldives, Bali, Quick Check, Five Below, Disney, and more...A world usually reserved for land animals is now accessible to all. That's what our mission is truly about, making a world accessible to every race and species.....including Walmart fish. We have a lovely poem prepared to describe our feelings.

What it does

We had an idea to use motion sensor cameras to give a goldfish complete mobility, allowing it to control a vehicle that its tank is attached to. However, since we had a broken part, we weren't able to make the fish control. If we had the part, the fish would be able to move with the power of color tracking sensors. We instead, split the project into two parts as a last minute solution as they both are both equally impressive. We have a color-tracking demo as well as a moving car with a fish tank on top of it. We use RoboRealm for the color-tracking as well as circuitry for the moving car.

How we built it

We used wood from a picture frame as a base for the robot, used an Arduino to code, the motions to move the bot in any direction depending on the fish's position in the tank, in which we got help from a software from RoboRealm, where we located yellow pixels and tracks the location of the center point of a huge blob of pixels which are yellow. The coordinates at the center will be calculated to see which quadrant it is located in, and then it will move forward, backwards, right, or left. Since we came across a technical issue, we had to split the project into two parts: the color tracking and the moving car. The moving car used circuitry while the color tracking uses RoboRealm and pixels depending on a visual color, which in our case is yellow, to be able to locate all yellow pixels and find the center point of all pixels

Challenges we ran into

Our first fish died, one of our team members did not show up, one of our team members with the password to the Windows laptop we needed had to leave for a bit, we found out the hard way that exe files don't run on macs, we had to download a VM, the VM did not work and wasted our time, and we had some wiring issues. At the end, we faced a last minute issue with a broken part. We had to split the project into two parts: the color-tracking and the moving car.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of keeping our fish alive, setting up Roborealm, building a robot with almost no planning, learning about VMs, and actually pulling this off.