Rando- Arduino Controlled Randomly Sketching Robot

I began pondering about a robot that could sketch on the floor. Just after a brief browsing session, I came to know about the awesome variations of such a project that people have worked upon!

The Open Sourced Turtle Robot (OSTR) inspired me the most. This project guided my thoughts to this two-wheeled mechanism. But then I thought what if the robot could generate its own sketches; well that would be fun to watch what's on its micro-controlled mind :D. Thus the objective was to visualize randomness and chaos on the floor!

Concept Sketch

Before fixing hardware components

I started with the arduino sketch and began building the hardware and testing the circuits. The wheels were a real toughie, finally decided to glue sunboards together with crisscrossed fibers.

I tried my best to build the bot with household materials. The sketching pen is operated by a servo motor. To operate the stepper motors at 12V, I used a DC to DC converter; which apparently runs very hot, had to mount a cooling fan which kind of looked more cool :) .

Sadly the Arduino nano gave a lot of issues with the sketch upload, decided to go with the Arduino UNO.

I have coded three main functions for random lines, triangles, and squares, but there is no limit to the randomness ! Rando can also be used for drawing predefined shapes and sketches :)

After assembling and a heavy round of testing (pen removed)

The code can be found here https://github.com/Warpdrivesadhu/Rando

Working Video: Rando in Action

Function randTriangles( ) executed on floor tiles, Dorm room, JCB Hall !

Later on, I programmed it to print text! and sure it was fun :D

Hope you enjoyed the project!