The Simplest Line Follower – Upgraded! [Updated]

Hello everybody!

Apologies for not writing for so long! Work has kept me really busy so I wasn’t able to do much till now.

Last week I finally got time to do a bit of work. I made my own PCB :). I wish I had learned this back in college. It have would saved me so much time.  What PCBs did I make? The line follower circuit (Click me to open tutorial) I explained before. That design had two very irritating problems. Firstly the wires would keep breaking off and I would have to re-solder many times. Secondly, the cardboard mounts would keep bending.

The new robot uses very little wiring. None of the wires have been soldered. I have also replaced the mounts for the sensors. I will describe everything in today’s post.

Bruno The Simplest Line Follower – The Workshops :)

This post comes after I bumped into a video I should have posted along with the tutorial on this robot. As I said in that tutorial, the robot (I named it bruno later) was made for a workshop. This workshop was held two and a half years back and was a huge success considering the last minute planning and the limited help we had. Here is a video of me at the workshop which I happened to find on youtube today. Can’t believe I forgot this one. Here you go…

The Simplest Line Follower [Updated]

Alright! First robotics project on the site :-)! This is a robot I made for a workshop, which I conducted under my college’s IEEE chapter. The robot is the simplest line follower you can make and I feel everyone who wants to start with robotics and does not know how to, should begin with this one. It does not need a microcontroller or any complex digital logic circuit. So you don’t have to worry about writing code in C and Assembly. You don’t need to worry too much about the design either. This robot is based on another line follower I had learned at a workshop (conducted at M. S. Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bangalore). There is a difference of just one IC. The change was due to that fact that my robot uses 12V motors while their’s used 5V motors (with a gear system). Basic idea remains the same.

Note: If you are interested in a microcontroller based line follower I suggest checking this out http://www.kmitl.ac.th/~kswichit/LFrobot/LFrobot.htm

Before we begin. lets see the robot work!

Notice that the track is very simple.