The Brainless Robot - SEURBOT v.1

Semester Project-Light Following Robot

When I started the Electrical Engineering program at NED, I was very excited. That I will finally be to do something practical and will start making cool stuff. Well that excitement just died within a month. Classes were boring than ever, even in labs major time was spent listening to lectures rather than doing anything hands on.

In third semester we were assigned to make a project for, "Instrumentation EE-221" course. The only guideline was to make something using sensors. Even though we were in 3rd semester we knew a very little about electronics and were not taught any programming. Our only resort was google. Internet have a huge collections of circuit diagrams, however, most of the websites do not explain how they work. Almost everyone decided to implement those circuits and without proper explanation debugging the circuit was almost impossible.

I wanted to make something fun, a robot maybe. But with little knowledge about electronics and absolutely zero knowledge about programming the use of micro controller was out of question. However, I did found a tutorial on ' Light Following Robot ' without any micro controller.

Concept was simple, a voltage divider circuit was made by connecting Light Dependent Resistor and a Potentiometer in series. When there was not enough light voltage divider would give a low voltage and for bright light enough voltage was fed to MOSFET to turn it on. The MOSFET was connected with Motor and Battery, and therefore whenever shining a bright light meant spinning motors. The complete detail is available on this link : http://www.sciencebuddies.org/science-fair-projects/project_ideas/Robotics_p022.shtml#summary.

SEURBOT v.1 in Action

Most amazing thing about the project was it was the simplest circuit in our class yet much cool than almost everyone. Some of my classmates were so surprised that they even asked me if I got it built it from someone else. When I showed and explained the circuit to them, one of them said, "Oh ! So we connected LEDs to our circuit and you connected Motors".

And that was exactly what I had built, a voltage divider circuit on wheels ! 

It was after this project and the appreciation and also the annoying questions, I realized that I can still make cool stuff out of the class. Engineering was fun again, well the lectures were still boring but the idea of becoming and engineer and able to make stuff was amazing.