Meet Arsonbot.
He just returned home after spending two years buried in boxes in my storage unit. I figured it was time to bring him home and commence repair work.
Arsonbot is a scratch-built robot I made during college, but never did finish. His chassis is based on a Tamiya tank tread kit. The computing power is provided by a BASIC Stamp 2: HomeWork microcontroller, connected to a Pololu H-bridge module for driving the motors. There is a Parallax PING sensor for measuring distance, attached to a small servo to allow for looking left and right. The only other sensor in board is a simple bumper to detect collisions. The rest of the chassis is composed of assorted Erector Set/Meccano parts and some plywood, plus an antenna for decoration. Oh and on top sits a small fireball cannon.
The part I never finished in the hardware was hooking the fireball cannon to the microcontroller. It’s based on something I saw in Make: Magazine years ago, designed to launch flash paper/flash cotton by way of a glo-plug (one from a Nitromethane powered radio control car). The idea is that the fireballs it launches leave no smoke or ash, and disintegrate within a second of leaving the barrel. Relatively safe, considering its name.
Now that he’s out of storage, I can redesign the electrical system so I don’t have to rely on three separate battery packs. In general, operational time has been rather limited due to the power consumption of the motors. Plus, he can’t drive in a straight line; there’s a bit of listing from the tracks being slightly mismatched and the spokes add a significant amount of friction to the entire drive-train.
He’s programmed in PBASIC over a real RS232 serial connection. Can’t say I ever wrote a good AI for him, just a few test programs for the critical functions as I added each new component.
Work on completing Arsonbot will begin soon.















