Arduino Bot with OV7670 camera

In the fourth week, the robotic arm was fully assembled as shown in the image bellow. The arm was also tested with the circuit. The servos that where connected to the circuit where all working and so was the camera, however, the 'pincher' of the arm was not working as the gears in it where not aligned correctly. This will be an easy fixed for bench day was the gears just need to be put into place correctly using an adhesive. Also the base servo was not spinning the arm as it was not connected to the bottom gear correctly which could also be fixed easily using an adhesive. This is show in the video bellow. The only things that are needed tone done are attaching the camera to the arm and fixing these small problems.  Capacitors where also added to the circuit across the VCC and the GND stems of the potentiometers as this stopped the 'golt' of the servos when the Arduino was turned on as well as getting rid of a humming noise that the servos where making. This is due to th...

 In the third week of the project a lot of progress was made. The 3D printed parts of the arm had arrived and Rhys and Jiayi started putting the parts together as shown in the picture bellow. In the design of the robotic arm that we had gotten from the internet, it said to have 6mm diameter ball bearings but they did not work too well in the arm so 8mm diameter ball bearings where used that where acquired from the lab technicians. The 3D printed parts needed to be filled down so that they where able to fit together properly and so that the nuts and bolts where able to be put in. This was definitely a learning curve from the group as we have never had to 3D print anything before and had reliesed that the material used for the parts was not the best.  After the break, the group put their heads together to figure out how to make the potentiometer-servo controller circuit work whilst Haopeng made a start on the poster. The group had decided to figure how to make one of the servos ...

 In the second week, the components needed to continue had arrived in time. The group split into two teams, Harvey and Rhys focussed on the potentiometer and servo controller circuit and Jiayi and Haopeng focused on the camera circuit. Harvey and Rhys had decided to test the servos to see if each where working. To do this, code was needed to be inputed into the Arduino. A screen shot of the code is shown in this blog as well as a video demonstrating that the servo in the video was working as it was pulsing from 0 to 180 degrees as the code intended. This was done with all of the servos to make sure they worked. After this was done the schematic shown in the week 1 blog was put together however the circuit was not working. As the code was put in correctly and the circuit was connected correct to the schematic that was made, the circuit did not work. After trying many iterations of the circuit the session was over, the circuit pieces where far too delicate to take home to finish so t...

The vision of the this project was initially to create a path finding finding robotic arm that was able to spot the character 'Wally' from the 'Wheres Wally' children books. However, after having a discussion via message before the first week of the project the group had decided that this would be too hard and complicated to do as they would be out of their depth when it came to machine coding the arm and the camera. Instead they have opted for a robotic arm that can be controlled using potentiometers and servos by mapping the 0 to 180 degrees of movement of the servo to the rotation on the potentiometers using an Arduino, hence the name Arduino Bot. Due to this they had to order some more components such as: -Arduino Uno X2  -OV7670 camera  -PCA9685 16 Channel 12-Bit PWM Servo Motor Driver X2 As we did not have all of the core components the group decided that they would use this session and the time in-between the next to research how to use and Arduino board and the ...