Building line following robots is fun and easy. Building a line-follower that is this tiny is a different story. The surprising thing for us is that despite how it looks, this robot whose name is Rizeh doesn’t use wheels to get around. [Naghi Sotoudeh] built the line-follower using two vibrating motors, with needles (not shown above) making three points of contact with the ground.

His website is a little sparse, but hit the downloads page to get a PDF file that serves as the build log. We also downloaded the 32 second demo video which is worth it. The magic-marker track that the bot is circumnavigating isn’t any bigger than the palm of your hand!

Onboard the diy PCB you’ll find two GP2S04 IR reflectance sensors which detect the black line on a white paper. The power-up sequence spends a few seconds calibrating these sensors. Speaking of power, [Naghi] went with a lithium polymer cell from a Bluetooth headset. At the heart of it all is an ATtiny45 which uses its hardware PWM capabilities to drive the two motors.

Of course line-followers rank up there with self-balancers as our favorite robot projects. But by far the ones we love the most are the speed-run maze solvers.