A long, long time ago, I went to Maker Faire NYC. To be precise, 4 months ago in September. While at Maker Faire, I bought a Spurtbot kit from ignoblegnome, and I have finally built it! I'd like to thank him for putting these kits together, it works really well. The parts are cheap ($8), but it still follows a line pretty well.
I followed the instructions pretty much to the word, although instead of hotglue I built the chassis with superglue and double sided sticky tape. Also, I found that the resistor that he gave me didn't work so well. My multimeter measured it at 48 ohms, and I think the current to the IR resistor made it to "bright", so that the sensor read a reflection even while it was over black. I swapped out that resistor with an 82 ohm one, and that helped a lot.
Nice work, GeneralGeek! Sorry the resistor I provided didn’t work well.
When I first saw this picture of this posted on the front page, I was like, “Hey, what is my robot doing listed as ‘New’?!?”. Then I saw it was your post. Glad to see you liked it. You did a good job, it works well even on the paper surface you used, which can be a challenge.
I have an alternative design that integrates a mini-breadboard and lets you alter the robot with different behaviors. Currently, a light folllower is the only alternate behavior I have designed. I’ll try to get it posted soon.
Hi GeneralGeek, congrats from the Spurt inventors from Rostock. And I am very very thankful to Andrew that he promoted the idea this way – cheers, Hartmut
Hey, Harmut. Can’t thank you enough for your inspiration and guidance.
I actually based a whole robot building class for kids on this, but I modified the design. I added a mini-breadboard, allowing the SpurtBot to be modified at will with new designs. In the class we did the line-follower and also a light follower. I really have to get off my butt and document the updated design.
