Study Buddy!

Inspiration

Too tired to trek across campus for your 8am lecture? Let Study Buddy travel to your class and stream the lecture to your computer.

What it does

Control Study Buddy with the motion of your head -- tilt your head forward to go forward, look sideways to turn.

How we built it

We soldered to an MPU 6050 accelerometer to an Arduino. When the accelerometer rotates on the x axis, the robot looks up or down. When the accelerometer rotates on the y axis, the robot looks left or right. On the z axis, it moves backwards or forwards.

Challenges we ran into

Our first Arduino was broken, so we spent a lot of time looking for nonexistent bugs. It a was difficult for us to interpret the raw data from the accelerometer. Our accelerometer was not connecting for a long time, and we finally realized that the connections needed to be soldered, so we both tried it for the first time, which was a learning curve.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built software that communicated across platforms (arduino and python) that actually responds to our physical inputs -- we were nervous that the accelerometer data wouldn't make for a smooth experience, but after some tweaking we made it work.

What we learned

We learned to solder, we learned how to interpret accelerometer data, and we learned how to import data from arduino into a python script to control the robot. We also learned how to use the Oculus DK2, because we initially planned to stream the video feed to the headset, but realized that this wasn't feasible without touch controllers.

Built With

• accelerometer
• arduino
• cozmo-sdk
• python
• soldering