Day 4: we’re done! Our robot now responds to knocks by shining in red and raising its arms! It also shows a live video of who is at the door. In the end, we weren’t able to implement wireless video sharing, but we successfully achieved the same thing with cables (which is not necessarily a bad thing, because hey, cables are stable).

Building in progress! Assembled majority of trash bin. Trying to debug our image recognition program and our pan tilt kit.

Day 2 & 3 progress: assembled robot arms and servos, servos panning and tilting correctly, robot can now wave at you :) We started working on the piezo knock detection and the bluetooth component of the project. We plan to have two piezos for knock detection, one that sends a signal to our LEDs (to light up interior of the robot), and another that sends a signal to our servos (to make the robot arms move). The bluetooth part of our project is looking pretty unpromising due to issues with installing Android on an rpi. We specifically need Android to enable wireless, real-time video sharing that can show our users who is at the door.

Day 1 progress: cut out all parts, assembled robot's body, made pan-tilt kits (mostly) functional

Got img recognition working. Kudos to Halanna Yuh! Now working on controlling the arduino via rpi.

Demo day was FUN! In the end deJunk could only separate trash into two categories due to difficulties controlling voltage output from the rpi. The change in voltage was what decided which way our sorter plate would tilt, but we only managed to have the rpi output two voltages, meaning our plate could only fix itself at two positions (upright or tilting). We therefore decided to do recyclables and landfill only, as opposed to our initial plan that considered compostables. Although the project did not come out as intended, it gave us valuable experience with mechatronics.

It was a fresh and exciting way to start our semester. As we move on to complete all the homework we have put off, we'd like to give a big thanks to our friends, senpais, Build18 officers and all the sponsors. We couldn't have done it without you!