Robot Symphony - When Hard Work Pays Off (Week 7)

We've come this far...

          "Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do." - Pele

    

     Group 3's Xylophone

     There come's a time in every group project's life when because of the members' hard work and dedication, they see results. In fact, in nearly every aspect of life, one can see results, and for us, that  was this week. Bringing together the structure, sound, and programs, we have taken a considerable step forward in the creation of our automated xylophone.

As you can see, its (mostly) all there. We currently have two mallets that can play 12 notes, but on the other side of the instrument, you might notice that there are more servos motors. Those are to allow us to be able to play another 4 notes on the sharp/flat scale.

As far as mounting goes, you might see that we ended up going with k'nex mounts with duct tape to attach the mallets. Due to the strong, rigid nature of the k'nex and their adjustability, they were a perfect fit for the project, and duct tape was able to hold the mallets in place due to their light size, and duct tape's strength.

One thing I would also like to mention is that to provide optimal movement of the pieces, we attached all of the pieces to a peg board. This includes the instrument, the servos, the power supply and the breadboard (which are not in the video, but are just to the right).

     Bringing it to Life
     We like to think this project as something that was brought to life -- our own little Frankenstein. But what really puts life into a project?

     We find that without the project being told what to do, it has no life. And to tell it what to do, we look to the code.

     Our project uses Arduino to operate, meaning that all of the electronic pieces are being instructed by the teensyduino we are using (a description of the teensyduino is in a previous post). Essentially, the teensyduino is telling our six servo motors where they need to be to strike what note. For example, as you could see in the video, the mallets were moving to the left or right one note at a time, and then coming down at the same angle to hit the notes. Like mentioned previously, this is the "brains" of the project telling the servos what magnitude they need to turn at in order to provide movement in the x and y directions.

Controlling servos isn't the only thing Arduino can do, and here's another example:

Here, there is a camera implemented to see the black line, and that data is inputted into the Arduino, as a result, the Arduino tells the wheels of the project what direction they should turn in in order to keep following the line. Cool huh?

We will continue to work on our project, since although we are proud, it is still not perfect.