Anat says “The light painting line follower looks like just a regular line follower but we used a really cool technique that allows us to “paint” using the light emitted from a strip of LEDs that’s placed on top of the line follower. In the post about the project, there’s a detailed explanation of how we built the build and also some insights about different components we used.”
Welcome to our most recent creation – the Light Painting Line Follower!
We are very excited to be launching this project – first of all since it’s the first full project overview on our Blog! And second, because we’ve been dreaming about this project for a long time and we were finally able to make it happen! Just to clarify, we’ll still be posting our project tutorials on our community hub on Hackster. In the blog, we’ll have more in-depth information about the project such as information about the components we used and how they are implemented in circuito, the code logic, and other interesting factors about the project.
About the kit and casing
We went with the Mini Round Robot Chassis Kit by Adafruit for the body of the line follower.
This kit has 2 wheels with DC motors, an anodized aluminum frame, and a plastic caster ball. It’s great for basic robotic projects because it’s easy to assemble and the differential drive, meaning the two wheels are controlled separately, gives it a nice smooth turning ability. Another plus for this kit is that it elegantly fits the power supply, Arduino and the rest of the electronics.
We also decided to make a 3d printed plastic hood for the line follower, for which we used a Flash Forge Creator pro, 0.3 res. On top of the hood, we placed 5 addressable LEDs with which we’ll make the light painting.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell with Google Hangouts On-Air is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
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