Electronics project

• You'll work in a group of 2 or 3 people.
• You'll design, set benchmarks for your project, build a prototype (unsoldered first draft),....
• Your project budget is \$75 per person. Though many projects will rely on pre-existing equipment.
• You'll show off your work to the rest of the campus at the Electronics Show held on our Reading Day (just before final exams begin).
• Your project should be ambitious and fun!

Project Ideas

• Dobot Cookie Icer (** to ***) You place a cookie in front of it and it squeezes out icing in any of several patterns for you. Builds on 2022 'Condimenter'. Maybe have several colors driven by compressor with valves to control the extruding. Needs Dobot, Arduino Due, Pixycam, tubing nozzles, 12 V valves (from automobiles) used to power vents from carburetor. (Online and code from previous classes available.)
• Giant Pong (* to ***) Use the (existing) Laser gyro system, projects a moving ball onto the floor or wall play area. It bounces off sides but each player moves a large colored 'paddle' up and down along a line on the wall. A. Pixy cam sees where they are positioned and bounces accordingly. Or B.(harder) the players just move a knob and a physical paddle moves in response. Needs gyro system, Pixycam (only for A), if B then slide rails for each and steppers w drivers. (Could complicate with gravity for moving ball or x/y trajectory of paddle).
• Fast Candy Sorter (*** for working with a new sensor) Jaime says the Pixycam is too slow... Use another color sensor (maybe Adafruit AS7341 or the even faster AS7262 (3ms)) and then stepper or solenoid to adjust the angle of a little paddle to deflect them into different bins. Use an interrupted photo gate for presence of candy. Will require some engineering to funnel the input candy into a steady stream. Spherical candy best. Probably => Skittles. Needs Color sensor (must buy) or Pixycam, steppers and drivers (or servo motor) with arduino drivers). May require some extra boards to convert arduino digital output
• Tea Light Extinguisher (**) A Pixycam aimed at an area. You place a lighted tea light in the area and a squirt gun is aimed (tiltable platform) and squirts water at it to extinguish it. Or the static squirtgun is moved into position. Needs Pixycam, Squirtgun, solenoid to trigger, stepper driven tiltable platform or mobile platform.
• Turtlebot fetcher (**) We've got a "claw" that can be mounted on a turtle bot. Add a pixy cam, and you can go hunt for objects of a particular color and grab them. And then...?
• Motion? (speculative) We have the tilt / compass / acceleration sensor from the 2021 self driving scooter. What else could be done with that?
• RC Car (speculative) what could we do with an autonomous RC car?

These are several ideas that your instructor thinks are do-able within the limitations(*) of our equipment. But perhaps these descriptions will trigger other ideas for you. Please suggest more project ideas too!

(*)For example, the Pixy-cams can give the approximate position on its rectangular field of view of a specified color 'blob'. The response time of the Pixy-cam may need to be considered.