Minecraft Creeper

Hello,

Greetings from Hong Kong.

This is my first Arduino project. I have worked with the handyboard and NXT few years ago. The Arduino seems popular and easy to get into for people from non-electronic background like me, so I decided to build something simple to get myself familiarize with the Arduino board and interfaces. For the look I decided to make it the Minecraft Creeper, for the non-gamers, it's a iconic mob that appears in the 8-bit inspired 3D game Minecraft. If you havent try it before, grab a copy now! 

The creeper is a mob which runs around in the game searching for the player, if it get close enough to the player, it will detonate itself and blow up everything nearby. I wont make my bot blow stuff up, but I will certainly wanted to make it be able to "search" for something. So I started off by making it run around without bumping into things first.

Underneath the frame is built using aluminium materials. This autonomous robot will perform a simple move-and-avoid action using its readings from the IR sensor. I tried to use the ultrasonic sensor but noise and accurate is fairly low compared to the Sharp IR sensor.

I got a Mega 2560 board on it. Motors are powered by a L298P chip shield, power supplied by 7.4v or 11.1v Lipo battery. The motor shield has a voltage regulator and it can also used to power up the mega 2560 with its 5V output, kinda handy.

I got most of the parts running well, now I just need a nice look body for the creeper.

Hopefully I can make it to recognize some designated objects, to mimick the search action in the game. And convert it into a 4-legged robot. 

Please check my pictures for the prototype. Let me know anything you like and dont :)