The Writing Robot

Inspiration

Robotics is seen by many as a very plain and boring activity, but robotics can be creative and artistic as well. That is why we decided to create a robot that can write and draw. We were trying to decide the best way to show this, and ended with the conclusion that bigger is better, so we had the robot write through movement.

What it does

It writes by driving in the shape of letters. It spells out "LEXHACK". However, we can change the code to write, or draw anything that our creativity can bring to it.

How I built it

First, the hardwares were brought in by Ben. Then, we wrote instructions for the robot, in form of code, to have it write out letters through it's movement. To capture and present this in a decent way, we took a long exposure picture of it.

Challenges I ran into

There were many challenges we ran into. The wheel didn't had much traction causing the robot to slide and drift, which made the turning sharply very hard. Adding to the list, the battery life affected the calculation, and therefore had to change the calculation according to the voltage the battery had at the time. .

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We were able to write letters and words with the robot's movements.

What I learned

We learned how to program with the Arduino. We also learned how to effectively work as a team.

What's next for Robot writer

We want to push it's limits by writing code that will allow it to have some kind of an input- starting off with entering words and moving to having it draw sketches by scanning and parsing images.

Built With

• a-robot-kit-assembled-over-the-summer
• programming-in-arduino