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Building a light follower robot is a classic project when getting started in the world of electronics and robotics. Although this project is usually built around cheap materials as a one-off project, we wanted to create a platform that is well designed, offering a pleasant experience while building the project, giving the capability of future tinkering, hacking, and experimentation...
Meet the ROBO light follower robot
The light follower robot is built around the Attiny85 microcontroller, which is the most supported and widely known Arduino IDE-compatible Attiny MCU. The MCU comes pre-programmed to do the light following in order to ease you into building your first robot from scratch! You can always download the code from our GitHub page. If you are not familiar with working with the Attiny using the Arduino IDE you can check Robo's relevant blog post
Since the ROBO Light Follower robot is built around the Attiny85 MCU, the circuit runs on 5V. An LM7805 IC voltage regulator is used to step down the battery voltage from ~9V to 5V. The robot has two MOSFETs (metal-oxide-semiconductor-field-effect-transistors) for controlling the two micro metal gear motors. Two light sensors (photoresistors in series with a small potentiometer) are responsible for giving feedback to the microcontroller on which side has the most light at any moment. As always we love to give you the option to customize your robot, thus you can select the light sensitivity of each side by using the sensitivity calibration potentiometer, plus the overall robot speed using the speed calibration potentiometer. Even better, we designed a mini perfboard for you to hack and extend your Light Follower robot and reprogram it from the programming interface on top using an ISP programmer. The mini perfboard provides power (+5V), GND, and three data pins (be careful of the current usage of those pins, you might want to disconnect the photoresistors or the speed calibration pot), so happy hacking.
What do you get:
A set of carefully selected parts to build your light follower robot and an Attiny85 MCU that comes pre-programmed to do the job.
In an essence, this is not just a light follower robot, but a mini cute robotic platform that can be customized to do lots of cool stuff.
LIGHTFOLLOWER
