Now when you read the title of this article, the first thing that probably comes to mind is an advertisement of some kind. Buy the ATS which cleans your tile.
But this is actually going to be discussing a project I created using Arduino IDE which cleans the dirt and all kinds of nasty things that accumulate in between your tiles.
This dirt holds tons of bacteria and your house doesn’t look as nice with these black lines.
As I mentioned earlier this project uses an Arduino board and the robot's main focus is cleaning the gunk that appears in your tiles after a long time. This dist comes from many things such as your feet, pets (if you have one), or wearing shoes inside of the house along with food that is spilled. This dirt is very hard to clean and takes hours (I know from personal experience. It is really painful and tiring.)
Main Functions
The Arduino board has two functions: squirting a water line between the tiles and following the line where the dirt has collected.
The water line allows the dirt to be scrubbed off easier and the line follower function of the board allows it to follow the space between tiles and keep going in a circle cleaning the tile.
At both ends of the chassis are brushes to actually clean the dirt. The robot will follow the line and squirts very small amounts of water as the brushes clean the dirt.
Now how does the code of the Arduino board work?
Code for Line Follower Program
Well, to run the line follower robot program you first need infrared sensors to pick up the line to follow it. The robot might not be able to fully pick up the dirt line and follow it so you might need to surround it with tape so it can properly function.
Here is the code that I used to program my robot:
As you can see this code highly depends on the infrared sensors. If the sensors do not work properly then the robot will stand still and will not do anything.
Code for Squirting Water
Next, we have the code for squirting the small water line. This is the code I used and as you can see, some lines show what the code means.
This code will dispense the small water line that will allow the robot to dispense a small water line to clean the dirt easily.
This is actually a quite simple project but takes some time to put together.
The final component of the robot is the brush. You could use pretty much anything for this part including a toothbrush. Of course, it would take longer to clean but it still finishes the job.
Takeaways
- The project I created is able to clean the dirt in between tiles that accumulate over time.
- The Arduino board has two main functions which are squirting water and following a line.
- The project has two brushes along the front and back of it also to properly scrub the dirt.
Shay Pema is a 10th-grade student at Cerritos High School. Feel free to reach out to him on LinkedIn!
