LineIronBot (Hacked Iron Line Follower)

LineIronBot is my latest robot. I have hacked my dead iron and now it is functioning line follower robot! :D

I was thinking of building a line follower for a few months now, even ordered bunch of reflectance sensors, but real inspiration did not visit me till my wife told me we need a new iron :D I looked at our old one and told myself: This is going to be my line follower robot! :) 

So, The parts used so far:

• Old electric iron :D
• Picaxe 28 pin project board and Picaxe 28x1 MCU
• 2 x geared motors from Dagu
• 2 wheels ripped off from cheapy toy
• Ball caster
• Blue LED
• 3 x QDR1114 reflectance sensors 
• Switch
• Resistors: 1x330R, 1x100R, 3x10K
• Wires
• Battery holder
• finally, 4 x NiMH AA rechargebles

First of all I had to get rid of heating element and cut off some plastic from inside to make some room for batteries and project board. Openings for wheels cut as well. These I got rid of:

Then components fixed inside:

Indicator replaced by an LED and switch fit in:

Line sensors soldered into piece of perfoboard and hot glued to chassis as well as ball caster and motors:

 Here are pictures of my hacked LineIronBot, complete and easy to store :D

I have attached a small test video, unfortunately I ran out of black insulating tape, so the track is very short :D

I'm thinking of adding more functionality to LineIronBot in future, possibly light seeking. And I want to use the temperature select dial for switching between line follow and light seek modes.

Update 28-Sep-2010

Finally I returned to this project to finish it. Thanks to Open OFFLINE robotics competition. I had to spend some time debugging the code and making it more robust for interruptions in line. I also added external programming socket, which is already became a tradition with my bots :D

The new video shows LineIronBot completing the competition track in little over 50 seconds. I have uploaded my code as well.