FALL 2017 Session 2
PIANOBOT
PianoBot is a musical, mechanical, and electrical assembly. It is a robotic finger that is hard coded to play two octaves (15 keys) on the piano. A stepper motor controls the motion and precision of the arm along a sliding rail and a servo motor controls the single finger movement to play each note; both will be controlled by an Arduino Uno. The Pianobot is based on another project found online. Our project differs by replacing one of the two servos with a stepper motor, building a more visually pleasing rail, and by using a different coding algorithm.
WEATHER BOX
Checking the weather is a common routine that many people do everyday. Whether you get your forecast on TV or on your phone, it is a very mundane task. This project introduces a fun alternative to the common way of checking the weather. WeatherBox is a portable display box that simulates the actual weather outside; it is fully autonomous so you can get the forecast delivered to you without even lifting a finger.
AUTOMATED ROBOTIC ARM
In this project, we advance the robotic arm project by giving it “eyes” and “feet” to see the surroundings and move within an environment. A camera will be attached above the gripper of the robotic arm to recognize an object within its field of view. If the robot finds a positive case in the image, we will extend out to the object and grab it. From then, the robotic arm will take the object and store it in a storage bin attached to the back of itself. The robot, itself, is also on a mobile platform so the users can use voice commands to move the robot through a terminal. This way, we can navigate through an environment to get in range of objects that we want to pick up.
SMART ARM
The Smart Arm is developed for strength and versatility. Students are able to build a robotic arm that can lift a wide range of objects and program many different functionalities into the Smart Arm. In this project, the Smart Arm is programmed to rotate to an object then lift it. Beginning with the rotating, students will build the Smart Arm from the bottom-up, Learning how to program an Arduino with Ultrasonic and IR sensors, control DC motor rotation as well as servo motor rotation, ending with the design of the strengthened claw. The main purpose of this project is remove as much of the mechanical limitations of a basic robotic arm so that students may focus on programming its functionality to fulfill a wider range of tasks.
CYBER LIFE
In this project, students will build a fully functional IoT Flowerpot in order for them to gain knowledge into systems engineering and full stack web development. The student will begin by building the bare bones of a web app using html, css and javascript, then transition to hosting this webpage and writing scripts on the Raspberry Pi using Python. Finally, the student will finish by styling the webpage and the flower pot housing.