FEBUARY:

We spent February getting the micromouse to achieve line following. The first task we had to complete was designing the LDR (light dependent resistor) circuit to put on the bottom of the micromouse so it could sense a change in colour. James designed the circuit, Karim soldered and attached it to the mouse, and I started writing the code to make the mouse follow and stay on the line. We decided to put three sensors at the front of the mouse and one at the back, instead of one at each corner, because having the three at the front allows for more accurate turning, and only one sensor needs to be at the back for combat.

It took a lot of editing and rewriting the code to get it to work, but eventually it did. We ended up putting a plastic sleeve over each LED, with a cut out next to the LDR, so that each LED-LDR pair were only affected by each other. This really helped the sensors work faster, and we didn’t end up needing to program a recalibration mode because the sleeves meant we had such a wide gap between the black and white values that we measured them once and then used those as constant values in the code.