Screenshot of the coding used in the end. Still needs more commenting done on it though.
Quick video of the road/treadmill. As you can see it’s free moving and doesn’t get caught up. LIttle bit noisy but who doesnt like a little bit of noise!
Here is the finalised treadmill and tin foil combination. The tin foil I decided to do overlapping strips. This way connectivity is kept and it’s able to lengthen and shorten (effectively) when going around the mill. I found this was an issue when just layering it over, what was happening was that the tin foil wouldn’t ‘stretch’ when going around the corner. Because of this it would just jam. With an overlapping stretch there was no way this would happen. Using electrical tape I was able to recreate a road.
Last picture you can see the car I used. A bit o tinfoil underneath made it golden.
As you can see by my lovely pictures that the wiring is messy as can be! If i;m honest I could of made them so much better but unfortunately everything I do is messy so why not a!
Back to my motor issue…
Now as mentioned before my motor which was in the kit AND the motors which i bought were not powerful enough, so I went back to my parents and destroyed a couple of RC cars which I had… Didn’t care about them though, one was meccano (as you can tell I prefer lego) and one was something from when The Fast and The Furious (first one) came out and it was ridiculous. Fun but ridiculous. However both these motors AGAIN weren’t torquey enough.
I then tried to connect two up at once to see if they’d work, nope. Nothing, not even a flinch. I then though maybe it’s because they weren’t geared. Used the housing for one of the cars and it’s cogs and attempted it with that, nothing. Again nothing but no movement.
It was around this time I found out that a low battery on your laptop means that your arduino will cut out and act like it’s stuttering. Panic does ensue thinking that your motor has burned out, wires aren’t connected, etc but a sleep and a clear head in the morning is when you realise that your battery was low.
Decided it was a good idea to wire in a couple of LEDs as a way of letting the user know when things are good and when things are bayud! Like before, the wiring was easy but coding needed a little work.
To code I had to make sure my digitalWrite’s were in the correct place for both HIGH outputs and LOW outputs.
Following on from the last video using tin foil I wrapped the treadmill to create a fully conductive treadmill to test if it was possible despite the large surface area. Fortunately it was :) worked incredibly well.
Here is a quick test using tin foil instead of an actual push button. Works quite well if im honest. Surprised how easy it was to use the tin foil and how simple buttons actually are. I’ve done a little electronics in the past but forgot how simple these things actually are.
I just need to remember that the tin foil has some voltage running through it :)
Quick video of the circuit.
What I have is three button connected and a motor. Two buttons control the motor, one resets the motor. The controlling button affects the speed, faster or slower.
When coding I found it a little bit of a struggle to get the reset button to actually RESET. What I found through the tutorials was making the ‘value’ = 0 once my button was pressed. A little more complex than just putting things in, but helped in teh long term to understand what was actually going on.
