If week 4 was about assembling the robot from the SparkFun Pan/Tilt kit, then week 5 was about getting the completed assembly mounted and working.

This week, we were going to be sawing, drilling, soldering and tinkering!

After cutting a length of wood to act as the base, they decided they wanted to add some colour to the wood. Not sure if a whiteboard marker is the best thing to colour wood with, but it gave it a nice vivid red colour!

We then mounted our completed robots onto the base with a couple of small screws. Next it was on to making the robot controller, this consists of two potentiometers (aka pots) fixed to a wooden support. So again after cutting the various bits we glued them together with hot glue. Once this had set, we were then able to drill two holes in the top to allow the potentiometers to be attached but not before we had soldered the leads to the pots!

This actually proved be quite scary for the children, I think the heat of the soldering iron and seeing it melt metal spooked them a little Anyway once all the leads were attached it ws time to connect everything togther. So that meant running the leads from the potentiometers to plus and minus power rails on a breadboard and then running the remaining center lead to the Arduino. We then repeated this with the servos on the breadboard.

Once all those steps were completed and checked it was time to upload the program we had created on mBlock to the Arduino using a USB cable. You can see the completed robot in action in the video below. 

https://youtube.com/shorts/HZgOCn6FISM?feature=share