MECHii

I am starting a summer project and I hope to start this week. I am building a Robotic controlled human interface rover...(Took me so long to think of that name lol). I am naming it MECHii, since I love mechanical engineering. The name is great IMO.

I have uploaded three pictures of it. One is the logo I created which I will eventually somehow get printed as a clear backing sticker, I will put it on my MECHii. I also will add the logo to any and all documents about it. I have really high hopes for this project. The other two pictures are two renders from my sketchup module I created. Its mostly drawn from scale. I figure the overall body of MECHii will be 1'x8"...I am not sure...I want it to be about 90% of a square and I am guessing those measurement, I havent actually got a ruler out to measure it.

Mechii is going to be broken down into two parts...MECHii and MECHii V2. MECHii one is the basics. It will be the design of the most crucial parts of the robot and the aesthetics of it.

MECHii will be composed of two main electronic modules. Lighting Module and Driving Module. Lighting Module is in control of the lighting of the rover (go figure). There will be two super bright LED's in the front to serve as head lights. There will also be two red LED's in the back. These will be controlled by a photo-resistor and my arduino. In a nutshell it will be like this. The arduino will read the amount of light from the photo-resistor and then if its less than or equal to X, the four LED's will come on

ex: (Not in actual programming language, simplifying it so its understandable)

if light <=X
{
turn 4 LED's on
}
else
lights off

The driving module is going to be a little bit more difficult. I want to have four motors controlled by the new rf control sheild for the arduino. It has four channels (one for each motor). I cant get into the motor to much because there is so much I have to work out with it such as size, voltage, etc... This project will be done by the end of the summer. Easier said then done because I have to buy some stuff online

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MECHii V2
This wont be any time soon and that is mainly just because of the cost to create this. It is going to be self driving. It will have a iR sensor and ultrasonic ranger finder. Those will be use to drive it without hitting anything. There will be a wireless webcam attached operating on the 802.11...im not sure what else but the main idea is that I can let it loose, get on to my laptop, watch as it drives.
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I think the main reason I want to create this, besides for the obvious ttoonnss of fun that will come out of it. It will put my foot into the door of mechanical/electrical/aerospace engineering. I also want to be able to brag about this. I don't want any help on actually building it. I want to personally drill every hole, solder every connection, etc. I will probably have to do a lot of online seaching for the theory behind it. The aesthetics are going to be great on MECHii. There will be the plastic glass type stuff as the overall body. Its going to be drilled and screwed on to two parallel metal L trim frame. The metal L frame is going to have two spots per frame. Each one of these holes will be the wheel hole. I hope to maybe buy an LED rope for underlighting, that would also be controlled by the photo-resistor. I want to get three stickers attached to it. I want my MECHii sticker with the clear backing attached to the plastic frame. I want to get another custom sticker that says "This is ^NOT a toy" the '^' and the 'not' will be in red and wrote above the rest of the letters like it was added after. The other one is just the radiation warning sticker.

Like I said I have high hopes for this project and hope that it keeps my summer really fun. Gooood luck aaron