Smart Doodle Bot: ES100 MC Group 3

This is a smart doodle robot built from a kit purchased from "Hobby King." It is for our ES100: Engineering Design Project class at Montgomery College. Right now, we've followed the instructions given in the kit and built our robot. As can be seen in the video, the robot can draw. We still need the robot to play music. We have purchased a piezo speaker from "Vetco.net." However, we are unsure how to wire it on our robot. Could you please advise? Pictures of the controller board and the Piezo speaker are attached. Thanks!

Draw, Dance, and Play Music

  • Actuators / output devices: servo, Gear motors
  • CPU: Atmega8A
  • Operating system: Arduino
  • Power source: 4 AA batteries
  • Programming language: Arduino
  • Sensors / input devices: Piezo Speaker
  • Target environment: On a smooth drawing material.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://community.robotshop.com/robots/show/smart-doodle-bot-es100-mc-group-3

Play music…

The doodle bots have the ability to play music by sending various PWM frequencies to it’s motors. No piezo needed. As a matter of fact, there is an example sketch included with the doodle bot’s example code.

I sorta have to agree with chicken…  What exactly are they teaching you in this robot class?

Thanks for your comment!

Hello!  Thank you for your comment!  Yes, I’ve now found information that explains how to atttach the piezo speaker.  Also, I realize that the doodle bot could send PWM frequencies to its motors, but wanted to use the piezo speaker so that the music would sound better.  This isn’t exactly a robot class.  It is an engineering design course where we learn how to design parts with CREO.  The building of the Smart Doodle Bot is just part of the class.

Look, sorry, but…

Look, I’ll apologize for some of the comments you (and others are getting), its just that these posts caught us all off guard --and still do. To be honest, there are two issues here. One, none of us can understand anything about this class or syllabus. It truly seems like your teacher told you the manual was the whole lesson plan and then walked away. It is as if there is no day-to-day, step by step instruction on how to get into robotics.

Robot building is about starting very small, then learing a little at a time until you have a working robot made of various small systems. We learn this, “step 1, step 2, step 3…)” --Reading all these “Doodle Bot, team whatever” posts all seem like your instructor threw you in at step 24 or so and just said, “good luck”. This leads you guys to LMR asking questions about steps 1-23 (to get you caught up from where the instructor dropped you) and leading us to keep asking questions like, "dude, what are they teaching you!?!"

So that is step one, we are all just baffled as to how this class is being arranged.

The other one is very common and you shouldn’t feel too bad about it. --Asking easily googleable answers does not go by very well around here. I.e.  Simply googling “Arduino Piezo” would have gotten you where you needed to go.  Then again, I have to revert to the teaching methods and ask why the teacher is not teaching how to use google to find info, how to read datasheets, how to be the “information seeker” one needs to be to be a robot guy.

We’re not trying to be hard on you, we are all just a bit confused.