Line Following Robot

Last crawled date: 4 years, 3 months ago

This is a line following robot I designed for the Zebra Explorers post. It's based off the same chassis as my mini Sumo robot. It has the following features:
Controlled by a Raspberry Pi ZeroW
Two analog reflectence sensors
Laser TOF distance sensor
AVR micro for power management and analog/IR input
Uses Python 3 for programming, and c for the driver libs.
The BOM has all the parts/pricing as well as sources. The cost when building 30 units was around $75 each.
The instructions to setup the bot from a standard Raspbian install are included in setup.txt,
If you prefer, there is an already setup image, see below.
Instructions for building the bot are in Assembly.pdf
You communicate with the Pi using ssh either over wifi or USB. The Zero will appear as an NDIS ethernet adapter when plugged into your PC. It shows up at 192.168.42.1, the account is of course pi, and the password is SumoBot.
After logging in, cd to code/test. There you will find some test code. sensors.py displays the distance and reflectance sensor values, as well as the battery voltage. motors.py can be used to test the motors, as well as for adjusting the center point pots.
To turn on the bot, press and hold the switch for a second, until the blue LED on the board comes on.
To turn the bot off, press and hold the switch for a few seconds until the blue LED starts to blink. When the LED goes off, the bot is completely powered off. The battery is blocked by a FET so you don't have to worry about leaving it plugged it.
If the blue LED starts to blink while running, that means the battery is getting low. The bot should shutdown before the battery gets too low, but you might want to turn it off at that point, just in case.
Prebuilt image
A full disk image for the bot is at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1x3cDfR26dcHZn25fXI_K_bmpcQTh8dHZ/view?usp=sharing
You will need to go into code/AVR and do the command: make prog
That will program the AVR micro. Also, you will need to setup the WiFi to your local access point. Instructions are at: https://jsconsulting.com/explorers/sumo/docs/Setup.txt