Introducing Sandy Lloyd (and project( Mayhem))...

This is Sandy Lloyd's first post on Electronomous so give him a warm welcome! I've been chatting with Sandy on G+ for a few months now and he's definitely got the maker's spirit. Currently residing in Cocoa Beach, Florida, he's keen to fill you all in on his latest project.
- Adam.

As long as I can remember I have been fascinated with robotics and tech.

I have always dreamed of building a robot. You know, the big Mech kind. The kind ya see in the movies. You know - climb in and battle til' the death (of the bot).

Well, over the years my dreams got more and more "realistic" until I arrived here, where I am now. This was before I knew about Arduino, or the entire DIY robotics scene. About two years ago I found out that there were people that actually got to build their own robots.

Unfortunately, things happened and I sort of lost interest. About three or four months ago I was reading an article about this little gizmo called an Arduino. It was a microcontroller that helped you learn programming and helped you figure out how to build your own circuits.

I thought to myself, "That is exactly what I want to do."

With a little research I found sparkfun.com, and pololu.com. At their websites I saw that there were a plethora of MCUs (MicroController Units), LED's (Light Emitting Diodes) and every sensor you could think of - so I placed an order.
Not fully understanding what I was getting into I ordered:

• a Pololu Baby Orangutan
• an AVRISP II programmer
• a Shiftbrite
• a couple of push buttons, and
• a geared motor

At that point I didn't know just how complicated programming could be. I messed around with it for about a month, maybe a bit longer. But I quickly realized that I had jumped in too far. So, I went back to sparkfun.com and ordered an Arduino Uno R3, some resistors and a couple of other things. That was the ticket - just what I needed. Within days I had written my first bit of code and I was hooked.

Now that I am armed with a much more robust arsenal of parts, an Arduino, a tad bit more knowledge and some very intelligent friends (both of whom are authors on this blog) I am off to build my first "real" robot!

First things first - I am going to post some pictures of some my parts for the robot. The robot, as of yet, has no name. So lets get to some pictures. 

Large 1 watt LED's
The smaller LED in the middle is a
RGB LED

Arduino Uno R3

On/Off switch, two bumper
 switches, Piezo speaker

Accelerometer

QTR-1RC Reflectance
 Sensor

Wheels And Servo horns

Servos

Solar Panels, LDR , and a Thermistor 

Starting at the very top from left to right we have:

• Arduino Uno R3, the brains of my bot.
• Two, large 1 watt ultra bright LED's, they are the head lights. A RGB (Red, Green, Blue) LED, for status indication.
• Snap action switches for tactile feedback so my bot knows when it has ran into something, an On/Off switch for killing power from the batteries, and a piezo speaker for alerting me if it has fallen over or someone has picked it up.
• QTR-1RC sensors for edge detection and line following. so when I am letting it drive around on the table it wont drive or back over the ledge.
• Accelerometer it detects motion on three different axis, it will set off the piezo speaker in case it falls over or the kids pick it up.
• Wheels and servo horns for mounting the wheels to the servos.
• Servos for spinning the wheels, that small Servo is for a Sharp infrared proximity sensor (not pictured).
• Last but not least is a Thermistor for temperature sensing, a LDR (Light Dependent Resistor) for finding the brightest part of a room when the batteries get low, and Solar Panels for charging the batteries.

Those parts are all for the build. There are more parts but I'm not nearly as organized as I should be for a build of this magnitude. Remember, this is my first actual robot build. I will post more pictures of the actual build once I get to that point. Right now I am cutting brackets for the servos and stuff like that. I really do not have a design, this is all coming from my head. After all parts are cut I will update everyone.