Mouse Bot Transformation

Wall Follower Mouse 'Bot Transformation

Part I. Transformation Begins:

At last I've begun to transform the little wall follower mouse into something a little smarter... The mouse bot is pretty cute, and simple... The mouse itself is a BEAM robot, that is, it simply consists of a SPST switch with a long "whisker"... When you turn on the bot, immediately one of the motors starts to run...

You can see the whisker extending from the body of the BEAM bot in the picture:

From Mouse Bot Tra...

You can see the whisker at the top of the photo...

So the motor is on, the mouse turns "into" the whisker, then the whisker contacts the wall, the SPDT switch throws and Voila! We turn off the left motor and turn on the right motor which pulls the mouse away from the wall, then the whisker unbends, and the SPDT switch action, you guessed it: Fires up the left motor again.

From Mouse Bot Tra...

The result is the mouse runs along against any "wall" and follows the wall, wiggling from one side to the other thus simply pulling itself along this way... Until the Battery runs out... It's a C-Cell - - You're going to have a long wait with each motor pulling only about 50 ma with roughly a 50% duty cycle...

Let's Gut This Mouse!

Don't worry, it's not going to be as messy as your old biology class... (Nor as sickening.) We need to strip the mousebot down to its essentials and make sure everything is going to fit together the way we hope:

From Mouse Bot Tra...

The wall follower taken to it's skeletal self:




I made a bracket from some electrical interconnect tabs which are about an inch long, drilled and rounded on each end. These are easy to bend. So I can check to see how the proposed pcb will mount.

From Mouse Bot Tra...

Now I put the cover over it to guesstimate whether or not it will all fit together




A closer View:

From Mouse Bot Tra...

Whoo Hoo! It looks like everything will fit...

Now my hopes are high for this project!

It's time for the high tech stuff... We've stripped down our Wall Follower mouse robot and we are ready to add some fun stuff!

We start with the nose... See next post for object detection...