Martin Luther wroteNice work J4D.
But, why not use the same bot for something a little bit more interesting; to mimic the behavior of a cockroach!
Cockroaches are hideous little creatures who run away when exposed to light to find a darker corner in the room. they use their whiskers (antennas) to avoid obstacle and are sensible to air and ground vibration (sensible to sound to some extent which they interpret as danger).
They eat almost everything wood,cloth,dead insect and they do mate a lot!
Your bot can be turned easily to a cockroach:
- you can use your infrared obstacle avoidance system as antennas for the cockroach
- your photo resistor can alert the cockroach when exposed to a light source and can help the cockroach find the "romantic" dark spot in the room
- Add a mic to your bot, and your cockroach will be sensible to high sounds thus danger, the mic will save his life!
As for mating, we need to find a female for our beloved cockroach, the female cockroach is nothing more than an infrared led emitting at a specific frequency. when our cockroach picks up the scent of the female, in our case her infrared frequency, he hurry up to her to mate
Now, we can program the cockroach by using a simple finite state machine algorithm.
Now try to picture your cockroach in the living room, the light in the room is switched off, the cockroach is idle, when you turn on the light, the cockroach start running like crazy to find a darker spot, he avoids the table on his way to go hide in the dark corner, you approach the dark corner slowly and try to step on the cockroach, sensing the danger, the cockroach is off running again
while running, your cockroach senses the waves of a female, and since this is its highest priority, he forgets about you and goes to his beloved female to reproduce!
The interesting part in all this is the ability to mimic a living creature.
That's the ultimate goal of robotics
Don't these ideas really require PCBs, actuators, motors,etc...? ;) (wink wink)
