In the Hackaday Froums, [Colecago] shares his experience collaborating with [Ben Heck]. They were building some “Robot Luggage”, and you can see the episode after the break below. The idea was that they would build a piece of luggage that would follow you through an airport instead of having to be dragged.
[Colecago] shares a little about the “behind the scenes process”. There’s a surprising amount of work that goes into a very little amount of video. From what we can gather, this video took over a month to make. [Jesse/Colecago] was quite embarrassed to have run into a mistake that he called “UART Dislexia”, where he repeatedly wired the circuit incorrectly. We say, don’t stress, it happens to everyone.
Another point he brings up is how much of a pain in the butt the Arduino was in this process. While people in the comments often argue about the use of the arduino, [Jesse] explains how this specific case would have been much easier without.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAyWrJoVUbs]
I also had my PNP transistor drawn upside down :-(
Its OK Jesse. We sympathize.
While people in the comments often argue about the use of the arduino, [Jesse] explains how this specific case would have been much easier without.
NONBELIEVER!!! ANGRY MOB, GET THE PITCHFORKS AND TORCHES!
Good luck going through airport security with that thing ;)
Am I the only one that thinks this would be a great build for an R2D2 bot? I mean, it follows you around!
Make it beep and stuff too! Maybe throw a pico projector in there.
Pico Projector! So much win.
I designed a system similar to this over ten years ago to control a wheeled toolbox. It worked close to the same but the difference was in the wearable unit. My system used an ultrasonic transmitter as well as an infrared LED. These would both fire at the same time and the infrared signal would start a timer on the toolbox timing the pings to two receivers. This was a simple approach and had the benefit over wireless where if the user turned away, the toolbox would stop. It would also stop if someone walked between the user and the toolbox.
I like the idea of an IR beam providing a fail-safe should a person cross between the master and slave. It seems especially fitting for the condensed pedestrian environment of an airport. Probably not as much an issue with your toolbox, which I might add, I’d of loved to have had on the flight line in the Army
This system has something kind of like that, if ultrasonic pings are being blocked, it will time out and not move. I wanted to implement doing both ultrasonic pings to the target and standard reflective pings to measure distance of targets in front of you for this exact reason but we ran out of time.
http://fwd.channel5.com/gadget-show/videos/other/vic-reeves-shopping-trolley
this is vic reeves on uk tv. 2008