Description

This is a coin picking metal detecting robot that was made during a 2nd year UBC electrical engineering design course (ELEC291).  This robot’s hardware consists of a H-Bridge circuit to drive the 2 motors on the wheels of the robot that allowed for both forward and backwards movements at different speeds, an oscillator circuit that was created from an inductor (orange circular windings at the front of the robot) that would detect a change in inductance when a metal was near the front, and the STM32 microcontroller on the robot that communicated use a JDY-40 Transceiver to the hand-held remote controller which was powered by an EFM8 microcontroller. The EFM8 controller would detect the frequency changes from the oscillator circuit and would emit sounds that a metal was detected.

Additionally, the robot had a 1-axis electromagnet arm that was able to pull metal objects to the electromagnet and then the arm powered by a servo motor would move the coin and drop it off in a container at the back of the robot. You are able to remotely turn the electromagnet off and on from the EFM8 controller.

Additionally, the robot was able to adjust to its environment by ‘zeroing’ the current floor as the reference frequency and only detect metals that were more metallic than the current floor.

This project was done with 5 other UBC electrical engineering students (Sophia Cockram, Brady Doyle, Mazda Farrahi, Andy Feng, and Adarsh Sood)