Step 1: Introduction/Motivation

BB (Brabeast-Bot) may look small and simple. After all, it's essentially four photosensitive sensors mounted on legs allowing the robot to move freely in any direction and terrain. It follows two rules of robotics:
1. Always looks at what lightsource it's tracking 3. If it gets to the light, it waits to be melted.

In order to achieve these actions, BB is designed to be agile with its surroundings with an adjusting orbiting swivel joint for it to better determine where the brightest light courses are. Light metering for continuous location tracking of lights is possible by the microcontroller-and-photosensitive combo that processes brightness information live into a feedback loop. The BB legs are created with simple geometric orientations to enable the walking movement through rotational motion.

Our goal for the video was to recreate a David attenborough style documentary like the animal planet series. At first, we really tried to save portions of his voice in existing documentaries and piece words together but that became way too hard. We settled with recreating his voice from scratch and it kind of worked out. It was really fun working on the video and I think it's a great method of representing our build.

Step 2: Project Video

Script

30 minutes north of downtown Toronto lies an area known as 1 Spadina. The bots have traveled to the resting ground known as the south side garden, and it's here, the bots make their longest stop on a journey that takes a year towards America. A young bot has been abandoned from the pact which made him more vulnerable to USB power predators. Like any other bot, it relies on solar energy to survive and is in dire need to maintain its orbital maximum with the sun. -His first objective is to search for other bots, however this proves difficult as they have disconnected from his bluetooth signals. In distraught, the juvenile bot attempts its own navigational instincts in search for light. However, youth and inexperience play against the youngling, the bot attempts to charge from afar relying on light reflections from the window. He gets nothing back from his efforts and became weaker as the days passed. Before it was able to reassess the situation and plan it's next move, the bot booted into idle mode running on it's last bit of energy. A human male discovered the bot and brought it back to his lab. Here, he fixed up the broken bot and gave it energy. With weeks of recovery, the bot was back on its legs, it's ready to get back on the road.

Step 3: Parts, Materials and Tools

Parts List

1x 28BY-48 Stepper Motor

1x uln2003 Stepper Motor Driver

2x DC Motor

1x L298N Motor Driver Control Board

4x Photoresistor

4x 1K Resistor

1x Solar Panel Power Bank USB Charger

2x 22mm Skateboard Bearings

1x Arduino UNO

1x Bread Board

Tools and Equipment

FDM 3D Printer (Prusa mk3s)

Hot Glue Gun

Soldering Iron

Materials

White PLA 3D Printer Filament

Hot Glue

Solder

Step 4: Circuit

Step 5: Machine 3D Model Build

3D model not able to upload

Step 6: Programming

Robot light tracker.ino
Download

Step 7: Results and Reflection

Through working with the multiple systems and re-writing the codes, the end result was exactly what we expected. The robot both tilts its solar panel head and rotates with its legs to orient it towards the brightest point in its surroundings. Our one boundary that made this less successful was the coding combination of multiple characteristics of the robot to change its behaviors due to external forces, we were only able to create one behavior of code which performed general tasks that adapted directly to the light source running on a loop. In the end, it is supposed to be a useless robot yet it does walk around to charge itself so that it doesn't die. We have learnt a lot about how different motors work in tandem with each other as well as how much energy each motor needs. Our DC motors ended up needing more energy to power the legs because of the friction between all of the joints. Our 3D modelling process was quite straight forward as we just plugged in the Brabeast legs and attached a planetary gear followed by the motors themselves. The solar panel is situated on top with a stepper motor on one end to change the pitch of the panel. If we would've done any additional things for the design, we would definitely consider a casing for the back end of the robot which ended up being a spaghetti monster. With a lot of trial and error, we realized we always needed to replace a component or wire so we decided to keep the back exposed for ease of accessibility.