The Open Source Tech team twice conducted a 3 days workshop on Hands-on Robotics and Arduino at Shah & Anchor Kutcchi Engineering college (SAKEC) with overall participation of 160 students. The workshop was aimed to deliver the essential knowledge required for making a robot by analyzing problems in a logical way. The students were guided to program an Arduino compatible OST development board with Atmega328 microcontroller using Arduino C programming language.

Through the course of the workshop, the students learned and interfaced the following components –

• LED
• Buzzer
• DC Motor (geared)
• Motor driver (L293D)
• Tact switch
• TSOP1738 IR receiver
• IR Remote
• IR Sensor
• LDR (Light sensor)

Using Arduino IDE the students learned the basic syntax and structure of C programming through various experiments. The conditional statements (if, if else and switch-case) and loops (for, while) were covered in the workshop. The students were introduced to the operators in C and understood about essential functions of Arduino C.

On completion of the basic interfacing and programming, the students went ahead to create their own autonomous robot with different applications. Obstacle avoider, Object follower, Depth avoider and Line follower were few of the applications that they coded and executed. The workshop concluded with a competition for fastest Line following robot using given components and acquired coding skills. The robot to finish the lap in the least time was awarded as the winner. Within the days, the students were able to understand the basic electronics, programming and mechanics involved in robotics.