Bluetooth Tank

November 8, 2017 - 2 mins read

Tank image

One of my final year university projects was to design, as part of a team, a robot capable of recovering LEGO miners from a maze-like mine at the bottom of a 10 m long PVC shaft. The vehicle had to be wirelessly controlled and send back live video. Our solution was a tracked vehicle with a front claw, controlled over Bluetooth, with video transmitted using a 5.8 GHz drone FPV system.

My role in the team was designing the electronics and power systems, and collaborating with another teammate on the firmware and software. At the conclusion of the project the robot was kept by the university, so I decided to extend the work myself and implement the parts of the project I hadn’t personally built.

I designed a small tank with two independently driven tracks, a stepper-motor-driven turret, and an NFET-driven laser diode. The exterior was originally modelled after the Leopard 2A7, but I later redesigned it to resemble a World War II Sherman tank. The tank can be controlled over Bluetooth from a PC using an executable I wrote in Visual Studio with Windows Forms, or from a handheld controller built around a custom PCB using two PSP analogue sticks.