Line Follower with No Arduino

There’s hardly a day that passes without an Arduino project that spurs the usual salvo of comments. Half the commenters will complain that the project didn’t need an Arduino. The other half will insist that the project would be better served with a much larger computer ranging from an ARM CPU to a Cray.

[Will Moore] has been interested in BEAM robotics — robots with analog hardware instead of microcontollers. His latest project is a sophisticated line follower. You’ve probably seen “bang-bang” line followers that just use a photocell to turn the robot one way or the other. [Will’s] uses a hardware PID (proportional integral derivative) controller. You can see a video of the result below.

Looking at how [Will] used simulation to devise a PID with opamps and a PWM generator is illustrative. As you can see from the video, the results are good.

We’ve looked at BEAM before. We’ve even seen mutants that combine traditional BEAM circuitry with microcontrollers. But it’s still nice to see the pure analog version running through its paces every once in a while.

Filed under: robots hacks