Kitchen bot

[spillerrec]

(I can't write right now, forgive me...)

The 25th to 29th October the high school I'm attending to was holding a project named "Robots - the helpers of the future". In short, we where supposed to have build a "robot" at the end of the week which they where intending to advertise the school with.

We used a day to figure out what we where going to build, but in the end it was decided on a wimp, we were going to make a "robot" that can stir a kitchen pot...

The only problem was, the school have never thought us how to build a mechanical construction... When we asked the teachers what we where supposed to build they gave us a construction kit called "GEARZ" (if I remember correctly).
GEARZ is apparently some poor ripoff of Lego Technics which basically contains some gears, some axles and some beams (and a small motor). The result ended up like this:

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Notice how we taped it to the table to prevent it from flipping over...

As the second day ended, I couldn't stand looking at that pitiful robot wannabe, so I used my spare time to make something better, in Lego of course.
As this was actually intended to be education/self-learning in electronics I decided not to use the NXT. So just the Technic motors and touch sensors from the good old RCX days : )
The electronics was mainly an Arduino board and then we added some stuff that we only partally know why work to add a speaker, a mic, the RCX touch sensor, a temperature sensor, in short pretty random sensors and the Technics motor. (We wanted to add an extra motor and touch sensors, but ran out of time...)

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So what does it do? It turns the black things around (which are supposed to resemble spoons) and if the temperature increases, it spins faster! But before it starts spinning, you need to trigger the microphone and because we screwed up you pretty much needed to shout...
And if you press the touch sensor twice (within 2 sec) it stops and beeps twice. Well, that's all...

It was also supposed to lift the spoons up of the pot, but the Lego wires turned against us (apparently taping the wires onto the Lego connectors didn't work : \ ). Anyway, I used the technique from my last robotic arm to allow changeable tools:

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It works pretty neat most of the time. There is also another tool than the spoons, but attachment maximum reached...

There was actually a competition going on, two in fact. The teachers selected their favorite and then the visitors voted for theirs.
And surprisingly, this "thing" came in at the top in the visitor ranking. (A shared first place with another group.) Well, it properly just shows how bad most of the other projects where... (There were about 50 in total I guess).
But there was actually a lot of projects using Lego Mindstorms, those kit where just apparently reserved for the first years or something... (But we are going to use them in CS soon : ) )


Credits:
Ideas: The full group (5 members)
Construction: Me (took around 2x5 hours, I can't believe I used that long for so little...)
Electronics design: the group members that receive electronics education (3 members including me) + some kind people
Programming: 50% by me, 50% by the 2 others (And no, the programming isn't worth mentioning...)

[fuzzball27]

I think I liked the gearz mixer more
I have a friend who uses Arduino, and I've gotten a bit interested in how the programming works...How would you describe it? Is is graphical or binary? Is board construction easy to get the hang of?

[spillerrec]

The programming is just ordinary C/C++ so if you have used NXC or something similar you will quickly get the hang of it. The commands are a bit more low-level and genetic, for example you only have one function to read from sensor input which then reads the RAW value. You will need to convert this value into something sensible yourself.
Board construction is also quite easy. We don't really know a lot about electronics, but setting up a whole lot of sensors wasn't that hard. Motors are most likely a little bit more difficult, but I'm sure there are some easy to follow tutorials out there. And if you actually know how to do something with electronics I'm sure it is a piece of cake to incorporate it.