Robot

By Hannah Fisher, Gillian Richards, Laura McNiven and Lesley Neilson

What we chose to build and why

We chose to build a robot that makes a noise and has L.E.D.s for eyes. We chose to build this because none of us were extremely experienced with electrical stuff so it seemed quite simple, allowing us to do it well but also it was still a bit of a challenge for us.

How we came to our solution

We came to our solution for our robot after researching circuits and what we would need to make our L.E.D.s light up and to make the robot make a noise. We first thought about building it all from scratch so we found out what components we would need for our circuit e.g. resistors for the L.E.D.s, batteries etc. We priced some components on the internet and we had a look at what was available in the L.X. office, where we spoke to the venue technicians and they told us about Maplins' electronic kits. These sounded like they would be good and would hopefully save us time so we went to have a look at them and see if we could find any that were suitable for our project. The kits from Maplin include all the required components so all you have to do is choose which kit you want and then depending on the level of the kit, follow the instructions and solder everything in the correct places. We managed to find a couple of kits that were suitable for our robot; one that made a 'dong-dong' noise and one that had L.E.D.s that we could use for eyes. For the robot head we cut out a hole for the eyes and mouth from a cardboard box and then covered it in tin foil.

Problems

Unfortunately both of our kits didn't work. There was something wrong with a piece of the actual kit from Maplins in our noise kit so although we put it together correctly it didn't work. With the L.E.D. kit the solder was touching and so it short circuited. We found out that to fix it we would need a solder 'sooky-up' pen to remove the old solder and then we would re-solder it. However, we were unable to obtain one of these so we couldn't get it working.