Project Starscream (William Dickson & Colin Couron)

C
Arduino

Project Starscream is a robot made by William Dickson and Colin Couron for ENGR 103. The goal of the assignment was to improve or add upon the robot in one of three given prompts. The prompt we chose was the innovation challenge. When looking at the robot, we were trying to figure out what could make this better. The idea that kept coming to us was instead of autonomous control, what if the robot could be human-driven? Given that we were working within the Arduino ecosystem we began looking at what available resources we had to retrieve analog inputs from some form of a controller device. We decided our best option was to use the Ps3Controller.h library (by Jeffrey van Pernis) within the Arduino ecosystem. This library provides a variety of functions including the ability to read the x and y coordinates of the PS3 controller's joysticks, button states, and trigger states. To pair the ESP32 with our PS3 controller we downloaded a software called Sixaxis pairing tool which allowed us to rewrite the MAC address of the PS3 controller. In our code we utilized the ESP32’s bluetooth capabilities to search for the MAC address we set the controller to have. Then using the library's functions we read the coordinates of the left joystick which is defined on a range of -128 to 128 for both axes. Using those values we set a “deadzone” where the robot doesn’t move, a range where the robot moves forward based on the y coordinate of the joystick and a range where the robot turns left or right based on the x coordinate of the joystick. Once inside a given range (for all except “off”) the left joystick is used to proportionally increase the speed of the robot using the x and y coordinates to determine our PWM signal value. Giving us our human-driven robot with full speed control.

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Artifacts

Name Description
Media for project (1) This is a link to My Media where we uploaded our videos of our project   Link
Media for project (2) The second video for our project   Link
Media for project (3) The third and final video for our project   Link
Project Code Here is the code we created to control our robot with a PS3 controller   Download
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