Project HALL-w-EV - Autonomous vehicle
Hi, it's Hambreros and Tamadillo. We set out to have a bit of fun creating an autonomous vehicle with not much more than an UNO Q and a few bits of wire. There wasn't much hard core electronics in wiring up 2 servos, but there was a bunch of code we had to figure out to make it work.
What we set out to do
The pitch was simple: enter the Element14 EZ-EV challenge, build a little robot that can drive itself down a hallway, and see how far “one 15-year-old, one 18-year-old sister filling in the official entry-age box, and an Arduino UNO Q” could get in a few weeks. We even wrote ourselves a five-post plan before touching a soldering iron:
- Basic motion primitives
- Remote control over the web (camera + WASD, “puppy on a leash”)
- Simple autonomy (line-following down the hallway with tape)
- Expand driving (manual override on top of the autonomous line-follower)
- Pick one: better telemetry, voice command, or corner-mapping
Reasonable plan. Didn't survive contact with the actual robot.
What we actually built
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Post 1 — wheels turning. Two continuous-rotation servos, bit-banged PWM because the board's hardware PWM pins are locked to the wrong frequency, a web page with a slider per wheel, and a 1-second no-command watchdog on the STM32 side that turned out to be the single most-reused idea in the whole project.
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Post 2 — a voice, a siren, and lasers. Not autonomy. Sound. A whole soundboard — effects, an air-raid siren, an AusAlert tone, text-to-speech, cruising music — because we went looking for a way to stabilize the chassis with pantograph legs, gave up on that, and got distracted by making the thing loud instead.
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Post 3 — one joystick instead of two sliders. Drag it, or drive with WASD/vim keys, plus every bug that comes with actually connecting two wheels at once for the first time.
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Post 4 — eyes. A live MJPEG camera feed, the “puppy on a leash” idea from the original plan, just three posts later than scheduled and built entirely differently than imagined.
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Post 5 — chasing a tennis ball. Not the line down the hallway the plan called for — real on-device object detection, a pre-trained neural network finding a “sports ball” and the robot driving itself towards it.
Zero hallway tape was harmed in the making of this project.
Thanks for reading
Five posts, one robot, a lot more debugging than either of us expected going in. Whatever comes next for Hall-w-EV, it'll probably also replace whatever we plan to do with something we didn't expect — and that's kind of the whole point.