Tim the robot

When approaching the objective of completing a maze and putting out a fire me and my partner, Jessica Connole decided to use the fan method to extinguish the flame and use the ultrasonic sensor to navigate the maze.

The first problem I encountered was during the wheel building process. My original wheel design was to complex to be completed by the 3D printers as well as a machine issue in which my wheel printed on an edge.

I tackled this issue by redesigning and re printing my wheel.

Next came the problem of wiring inically I connected the breadboard wrong as well as the original breadboard me and my partner used did not work as intended.

The solution to this problem required a full rewire onto a different bread board.

Next came the task of tackling the code. I learned a lot while doing this I made my own library of functions which were used to drive my stepper motors.

The first problem I ran into was the inability of my motors to turn backwards. The solution to this was the way I had programmed my stepper motors in. The pins are not meant to be put in, in order rather they go in, in a sequence of 1st,3rd,2nd, and 4th. This way the stepper motors are able to reverse the spin.  Another issue me and my partner faced was when Tim the robot wasn’t connected to the laptop it would no longer function as intended. The fix for this was rather trivial with a replacement of batteries tim was able to complete the route.

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In closing I would like to take a moment to appreciate my partner she is a mechanical engineer and you can find her blog linked above she done a wonderful job with team work and the manufacturing of tim. I handled the electrical portion and I learned a lot in perseverance as well as coding. Almost every step of this process required several iterations. If I had longer to work on this project I would have like to try a different way of approaching putting out the flame when researching the project I saw a lot of interesting ways to put out the fire. This project was also personal to me I was apart of a firefighting program at my highschool and I know the dangers involved with the profession so one day I would like to actually produce something to help firefighters stay safe while also saving the people in danger.