Micromouse Demo Day

The presentation can be downloaded here.

Want hands-on electronics experience? Want to program embedded systems? Want to work on really cool robots?

The Micromouse team leads will tell the story of their project from conception to competition. Micromouse is an autonomous robot that solves a maze. The team's robot won 1st place in the 2009 competition, held at UCSD on April 25.

See the Micromouse in action here: http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=842.

Delivering the robot required circuit design, PCB layout and fabrication, surface mount and through hole soldering, mechanical design in SolidWorks, and embedded programming. Throw in lots of testing and debugging, sleepless nights, and plenty of food, and you get three working robots. The team also constructed a to-spec maze from scratch.

The bot is a modular design with separate processor board, motor controller board, and power supply board. The processor is an ARM7 MCU running at 55MHz. All of the circuit boards were designed and laid out by Alex Forencich, fabbed by Advanced Circuits, and then assembled by team members. The mechanical components were designed in SolidWorks by Jeff Wurzbach and fabbed at a machine shop. Jeff led the design and construction of the maze, which is the only student constructed maze in the region. Alex wrote most of the low-level hardware interface code and Luan Phan wrote the high level maze solving code.

Goals for next year include improving software, improving sensor accuracy, and fixing some flaws in the current mechanical design.

Interested in joining Micromouse? Come to demo day and talk to Alex and Jeff!

Alex Forencich
alex.forencich@gmail.com

Jeff Wurzbach
apache405@gmail.com