My main contribution to the truck the mechanical design. I also picked up Arduino lessons along the way from Brent. Most of the technology muscle came from my partners, while I led the soft aspects of our project: logo, website, video, etc.
Here is our final demo video, thrown together with just minutes to spare before the project submission deadline.
And now for some pictures to walk you through our 48-hour sleepless journey.
We started out with a few parts from an Arduino robotics kit.
These parts were assembled into a little vehicle. We made use of promotional sunglasses to hold our structure together and bottle caps to serve as washers in lieu of missing parts. At least we had a glue gun!
The team decided that these components were not powerful enough. We really wanted this car to zip! So Brent and I walked to the nearest Radioshack and purchased the cheapest toy car we could find. Brent and I stipped the hardware down so we could prepare it for interfacing with Dan and Richard’s software via bluetooth.
The car gained some personality.
And so after coding, building, testing, eating, stetching, drawing, swimming, and dancing, we slapped a 16000mAh battery on the back and started driving it around. We managed to get it working midway through demos, so we made up for lost time by driving it around the expo floor and bumping into people for attention.
This got us our first collective Top 10 placing at a hackathon, and we were honored to present before hundreds of fellow students and judges. Our excitement got us through our extreme sleep deprivation.
Go team!
