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Step 10Final thoughts
As a project, the ghost climber was a roaring success and created much interest at my excellent local climbing wall, where the staff and other climbers were all kind enough to let me sit around playing with lasers on a quiet afternoon. A few were even quite keen to be guinea pigs for The Redpointer's first trial run.
Once again, here's the video of The Redpointer in action at the climbing wall:
I think that I will add the following features to future iterations of this device:
- Finer calibration between the sensor turret and the servo turret. These are currently positioned about 20cm apart from each other, so their separation is negligible in comparison to the distances covered on a climbing wall. However, there is some irregularity that occurs at the extremes of the turrets' arcs, when both the servomotors and the sensors deviate from their supposed linearity. A bit of tinkering should overcome this.
- An integrated power supply and on/off switch for the laser pointers would be much neater than the current staple-casing method. During the trial runs of my ghost climber device, I had issues with the batteries on the cheap laser pointers running out. This would have been avoided if they were powered from the same source as the Arduino or the servomotors.
- A more rugged casing for the whole device would be handy for trips out into the wild. Ideally, it would be something with rubber corners and a way to attach it to a tripod for uneven terrain.
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Another suggestion:
Try to add a "auto-follow", so that no one has to track the route. You could e.g. work with a pulsed IR-beam (like remote control) and serveral sensors in different directions.