If you’re designing a robot for a specific purpose, you’re probably ordering fresh parts and going with a clean sheet design. If you’re just building for fun though, you can just go with whatever parts you have on hand. That’s how [Sorush Moradisani] approached building Esghati—a “robot made from garbage.”
The body of the robot is an old Wi-Fi router that was stripped clean, with the antenna left on for a classic “robot” look. The wheels are made out of old diffusers cut off of LED lamps. Two servos are used to drive the wheels independently, allowing the robot to be steered in a rudimentary tank-style fashion. Power is courtesy of a pair of 18650 lithium-ion cells. The brains of the robot is an ESP32-CAM—a microcontroller board which includes a built-in camera. Thanks to its onboard Wi-Fi, it’s able to host its own website that allows control of the robot and transmits back pictures from the camera. The ESP32 cam itself is mounted on the “head” on the robot for a good field of view. Meanwhile, it communicates with a separate Arduino Nano which is charged with generating pulses to run the drive servos. Code is on Github for the curious.
It’s not a complicated robot by any means—it’s pretty much just something you can drive around and look through the camera, at this stage. Still, it’s got plenty of onboard processing power and you could do a lot more with it. Plus, the wireless control opens up a lot of options. With that said, you’d probably get sick of the LED bulb wheels in short order—they offer precious little grip on just about any surface. Really, though, it just goes to show you how a bit of junk e-waste can make a cute robot—it almost has Wall-E vibes. Video after the break.
No son, we have wall-e at home.
Wall-e at home:
Tch, these kids with their 21st-century cultural references.
My first thought was, “No disassemble Number Five!” :)
When I was a kid, a friend of mine built a “robot” out of an upside-down square bucket from kitty litter, a remote control car, and whatever interesting bits he could attach to it. This feels like a modern take on the same idea, but with a bonus of having some actual GPIOs available for the user to control things if desired.
I’ll have to remember this if I ever get stuck with entertaining a bored kid.
this is a robot made entirely out of new components purchaed for purpose, with plastic garbage attached to the outside of it as an aesthetic veneer, while the actual e-waste that used to fill that plastic garbage all went in the dump like it was always going to
perhaps an aesthetic accomplishment but it’s absolutely not “assembled from e-waste”!
Good point
-What is my purpose?
-You pass the butter!
Nice work!
Never before did I consider using LED bulb globes could be used as wheels.
I always like seeing robots built from scrap. However it would be more accurate to call this a telepresence machine. I however, infer from the blurb that the maker intends to extend it and perhaps give it some robotic capability which would be great.