A toy for my son

Forum 2005-2010 (read only) General Bar Sport
1

So hopefully this is the right forum to talk about ideas, if it isn't I apologize. I had the idea a few days ago to create a toy for my son, basically it would either be a r/c tank or truck with some extra stuff added on. Three functions came to mind.

  1. r/c mode, works just like any other r/c toy

  2. Autonomous mode, a lot of people have done this so I don't think I'll have a big problem.

  3. This is the trickiest one and off the top of my head I'm not sure how it would work. Basically it would work like a game of hide and seek, my thought was that he would have a small RF transmitter in his pocket and then hide, the toy would drive around trying to find the transmitter.

I'm guessing I could have it drive in a direction and check signal strength, if it drops off then try a different direction. Eventually if it can't find the transmitter it would honk or have some other indication that it has given up.

I'd also need to make it look like a toy, I was thinking of a off the shelf large r/c toy and hopefully it would have enough room to put everything I need into it, and a way to hide sensors so they're not easily visible.

If you guys think this isn't possible or can think of a better way, please share it :slight_smile:

2

Hi,

I have been making an autonomous robot project 'Surveillance bot'. It moves to a random location, stops and then monitors with a PIR sensor.

So, a fun game could be to try and sneak up on it! You could even put a big button on its back to 'Tag' it.

Or, how old is he? He might like helping you to make it. My 11 year-old likes to help, he can solder and drill.

3

Hey Si,

That does sound like it could be fun, I'll look into that.

My son is 8, he hasn't shown a lot of interest in electronics but he hasn't been introduced to them yet either. Hoping to change that a bit with this project.

I'm very new to electronics myself, I've been a programmer for about 5 years so my main obstacle is learning the hardware.

4

I bet quite a big proportion of the people on this forum come from a software day job.

There is something very satisfying about some real electronics and only having a few dozen lines of nice easy code to make the Arduino do what we want.

Good luck with the project.

5

I'm guessing I could have it drive in a direction and check signal strength, if it drops off then try a different direction. Eventually if it can't find the transmitter it would honk or have some other indication that it has given up.

Unfortunately, measuring signal strength is not going to work. Over several miles, you might be able to detect differences in signal strength.

Within a room, the difference in signal strength will be negligible, and will be more impacted by objects in the room than by distance between sender and receiver.

Nice idea, though.

6

Lot of modification with R/C with arduino,.

googling it.

Yhank's
Jeckson

7

Rather than a radio signal, you could use an ultrasonic one. You carry around an ultrasonic beeper and the tank follows you. You would probably have to dream up a lot of electronics from scratch, but it would likely be cheap. eg: the transmitter could be a piezo element from scrap, a 555 timer, a handful of scrounged parts and a 9V battery.

Some cheap electret microphones, some active filtering and a lot of tinkering on the receiving end.