Nerf Turret

Description:

Hackathons at Iowa State are 36 hours long and allow students to compete with a creative project of their choice. We chose to use an array of heat sensors, which was basically an 8 bit heat vision camera, to create a heat seeking turret. There were two servo motors controlled by an Arduino to move the turret. Our heat vision camera used I2C to send data to the Arduino.

My role:

I took lead of this project in a team of four. As an electrical engineer, I worked mostly with the low level code to control the motors and extract data from the heat vision camera. I also did all the wired connections for this project.

What I learned:

I learned a lot about search algorithms. We had to have our robot turret look for the warmest thing in its range of motion and then decide if it want to fire or not. As an Electrical Engineering undergrad, I was not previously exposed algorithms like this.