Introduction: A Never Fall Beetle

By Seeed
About: Howdy, we are application engineers in Seeed. Sharing projects with the maker community is awesome. Hope you like it XD Seeed is the IoT hardware enabler providing services that empower IoT developers to swift…

The Titanic was regarded as unsinkable ship, but sank on its maiden voyage, what a pity.

Today I will make a toy car, and I name it never fall beetle, which will never drop from the desk.

Step 1: Prepare the Stuff

The stuff is in 3 parts, electronic modules, the wooden board and others.

Electronic modules

Wooden and laser cutter

  • 3mm wooden board (400x400 mm size)

The others:

  • M2 screw and nut

3D Print a lampshade:

You can find a laser cutter easily if there’s a maker space near from you. I can say that every maker space has a laser cutter. If you can’t find the wooden board and a laser cutter, you can try the laser cutting service supply by Seeed.

Step 2: Cut the Wooden Board

You need a laser cutter and a 3mm wooden board here.

Just download the 2D file and cut it with a laser cutter. When you get the board, you need to paint it, to make it look like a real beetle.

Step 3: Install the Ultrasonic Ranger

Here we need some M2 screw and nut.

After this step, your ultrasonic will be installed in the head of the beetle.

More details please refer to the image, it is a very easy step.

Step 4: Adjust the IR Distance Sensor

You can find a slide resistance in front of Shield Bot, you can adjust it to make sure the 5 IR distance sensor work well.

You should adjust it until:

  1. When in a desk, all led off
  2. When in the edge of desk, all led on

Please take a look at the image for the details.

Step 5: Final Assembly

Actually there a manual with Shield Bot, which will show you how to install it.

You can find an Acrylic board, just replace it with the wooden board that we cut earlier.

And you should connect the Ultrasonic Ranger to SDA/SCL port, yet the sensor is no in I2C type, actually we are using A5 as the pin to control. You can make it to another pin in the code.

Step 6: Software Work

After the previous step, we got a beetle car. But it can’t work so far, it need some soul, the code.

Please click here to download the code. If you had never use an Arduino, then what a pity, but why not just start your Arduino journey here.

After you had download the code, just upload it to the Arduino board.

Then what you need to do is turn on the switch, and your beetle run itself.

Actually if you want a Hello Kitty, you can make it instead of the beetle.