Hands-On Experience in ME

            I am currently part of an on-project that I started on my own almost three years ago. It is a hands-on experience. It is a concept based off of drone technology. The first phase of the project was to develop a “land drone.” In this post, this is the only one phase I will talk about. This may seem easy, but starting from scratch makes it a very tough. There is an infinite amount of ways to go about this. So I applied the condition, “it must cost under $200.” Seems reasonable. Power sources become limited, how it moves becomes limited, and what controls it will use becomes limited. Then, I added that I wanted to make it go as far as possible with the most control possible. Two more conditions to optimize. Using an old RC car chassis, I found a power supply and made sure that the motors and everything still worked. Finding a solution to communicate with the motors from a remote location was a challenge. After a few failed attempts at the problem, my final solution consisted of keeping the controls digital to optimize response and control. The digital solution is the use of WiFi. This was also convenient because routers go relatively cheap on the online market place and are easy to work with. I could mount a network camera onboard and be able to view it from a ways away. Network cameras are much cheaper than other wireless cameras with their receiving units. Back to the control, transferring the signal from the routers became an interesting question. Easy to answer though. As there are still people out there who enjoy doing hands on projects, this means there is an entire market place out there for this kind of stuff. The Arduino shop was my next stop. They supply all sorts of programmable boards that help the user achieve endless results. I bought an Arduino Ethernet board and mounted it on the car. From this point on, I asked my dad for help on the programming as I have limited experience with programming and he had worked with Arduino before. I would continue to work on all of the hardware. The biggest challenge of the project came next. How to wire the entire system? Through a bit a research, I came up with a very complicated breadboard. In the end, it consisted of three voltage regulators, a few resistors, two transistors, and a few capacitors along with several wires leading to the camera, router, router amplifier, Arduino board, the power source, and the motors. It is the heart of this drone.

            Several errors along the way have helped us both learn about the complication and specificity of electronics. The project is still in the first phase. It is days away now from completion of that phase. The last few bugs need to be worked out. Because I am in college now, it is harder to go back home and do work so this drags it out even longer. The project could have been done in a week with the right parts and experienced minds, but because shipping takes time, thinking takes time, trial and error takes time, and the fact that we are both very busy people outside of this, it takes us a lot of time. The next challenge will be to see if an aerial drone can be made in a similar fashion for a similar price.