I joined the AUTOCAR Workshop by the UTM Robocon team on the 28 and 29th September 2018. The workshop was about the upcoming AUTOCAR competition where you have to make your own line-following car. It's a completely new stuff and hands-on experience for me. The seniors in the Robocon team taught us the basics of electronics, mechanism and programming which will be needed in the competition later.
After the workshop, I decided to join the competition. A mentor-mentee session was held to teach us the fundamentals of electronics part more in detail. It's quite confusing and challenging for me as I never seen this before. Each of us has our own mentor and we would get our electronics components such as resistors, LEDs, push buttons and others and turn it into a functional car. We also bought the soldering guns and leads to do soldering on the board given.
The soldering part took me 2 weeks to complete and I was out of the required schedule. Most of the other students already started they mechanism part and even programming part by the time i finished my electronics part. I was shocked that my circuits are functional when the battery are plugged into my board for the first time and able to program without short circuited. My roommate who also joined the competition almost gave up when his circuits are unable to be programmed. Luckily our mentor managed to put one capacitor and made his circuits programmable again.
I started the mechanism part by buying some of the perspex, screws and wheels from outside. This took me 2 or 3 days to complete as I have to learn how to use the cutting machine to cut the perspex to the size I want and drill holes on my boards to secure them in place. Besides, I have to crimp my own wires on the housings to connect the sensor board below , controllers and the motors to connect them to my main board. I connected the sensor board to my main board and tested with my phone camera to see whether all the Infrared LED's are working. After that due to the coming Test 1, I stopped for a week and did not managed to complete my programming part.
In the end, I joined the competition on 26 October 2018 but my AUTOCAR did not move so i was disqualified. I just wanted to experience the competition by looking at others AUTOCAR. The winner managed to complete the whole game and the best AUTOCAR design award was given too. I really quite enjoyed the game although it was tiring during the process and I learned a lot from this competition. I would like to thank my mentor and friends who helped me in the process of making my AUTOCAR.