A good friend and I have had a long standing "contest" to see who could build a small robot to navigate a path first.  Now, my cohort could have beaten me to the punch on this any time he wished.  His technical expertise is far beyond my own.  He hasn't, though, and this has been a great opportunity (several years in the making) for me to learn about embedded electronics.  After all this time, I am pleased to announce the completion of a very imperfect path navigating robot.

The tracking algorithm is very simple.  The robot travels forward until it gets close to a barrier, then it "looks" around to find the best direction to turn.  It can choose to turn 45 degrees either direction, however I biased the code for 90 degree turns.  If the 45 is truly the best path, it can be utilized.

The bot appears a bit epileptic.  This is because it has a tendency to track ever so slightly to the left.  Every few clock cycles I have it track back the other direction. 



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Last week I received the Circuit Bridge silkscreen kit.  With great anticipation, I ripped into the packaging and proceeded to read absolutely no directions.  Ok, I read some.  The kit was $20 and came with a contact frame for exposing the mesh, instructions, a paint squeegee,  and two small pieces of high resolution material, already pre-sensitized. 

In the picture to the right, you can see the contact frame and the circuit design that I used to expose the mesh.  You might be observing that I was crazy enough to use regular paper instead of a transparency.  You are correct!  Even more surprising...it worked! 

Exposing the mesh was a simple matter of layering the paper, ink side down, on top of the mesh inside the magnetic contact...

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