Line-Following Vehicle

An autonomous line-following vehicle built around a BBC Micro:bit. Designed the chassis, motor mounts, and wheels in CAD, fabricated the parts with 3D printing and laser cutting, hand-soldered the circuit onto a Kitronik robotics board, and wrote the firmware in JavaScript.

The control loop reads two light-dependent resistors on the underside of the vehicle and drives each DC motor at a speed that depends on which sensor sees the line. Most of the work went into tuning the LDR threshold values, since ambient light varied through the day and the bot would drift off the line through tight bends if the thresholds were off. Iterated on the thresholds and motor speeds until it held the line cleanly through the full track.