When setting up the project in previous steps, everything was attached pretty closely to the breadboard. If we want out snake to be the full length of the base, we will need to create wire extensions for various portions of the electrical. Items that are not available in store will take 3-5 working days (excluding weekends and bank holidays) to be delivered to your nominated store. I'm using a servo motor shield from seeed studios, but I am sort of just using it as a perf board, but a convenient one because all the ground and power pins to my servo motor are already jumped together, with a screw terminal for the battery input. And ignore those wires hanging off the board - I had prefiously soldered on female header pins for another use of the board, so I removed them so I could use this here. I eventually clipped them off but you can see them in the pics. We then take the differences between Sensor 3 and Sensor 5 (and store it in photocellDifference1) as well as the difference between Sensor 4 and Sensor 5 (and store it in photocellDifference2). This will tell us how much brighter the directional sensors are from the ambient sensor. Since the light will be shinning on these sensors, the difference readings should tell us how much light is being directed at each sensor. The attached graphs show the output angle values of each servo mapped over time, slightly out of phase from each other. The difference is when there is a different offset (delay in the time it takes one servo to get to the angle of the previous one in the line of waves).

This project was built for the Things that Think undergraduate/graduate class CSCI 4830-7 and CSCI 7000-7 for the University of Colorado at Boulder. Our group consisted of one graduate and two undergraduate students. We worked on the project for 8 weeks, most of the time trying to learn how to program the arduino and learning the basics of circuits. If you are looking to build this project, we do not anticipate this project taking nearly as long, but altogether could be completed in one weekend.If the steps got taller and more slippery, the snake would move more slowly and wriggle their front and rear body less to maintain stability. Our snake will contain three groups of LEDs, each with 6-7 lights on each strand. To create groups of LEDs, it is the same process as creating a single group with only one LED in it. In our snake we used Pin 5, Pin 6, and Pin 7 to control the different strands of the LEDs. Also to save space on our breadboard, we connected each LED group to the same resistor that then connected to ground. Cut two a piece of rubber about 1.75" diameter, so that it fits inside of the vacuum reducers. Cut two pieces of cord about 2 feet long, to act as tethers and to help position the body inside of the skin.

The LEDs groups will each need to be put on their own strands so that the lights can be distributed down the snake body.

Recommendations

Snakebots are used in situations where their characteristics give them an advantage over their environment. These environments tend to be long and thin like pipes or highly cluttered like rubble. Thus, Snakebots are currently being developed to assist search and rescue teams. When a task requires several different obstacles to be overcome, the locomotive flexibility of SnakeBots potentially offers an advantage. [4] a b Marvi, Hamidreza (2014-10-10). "Sidewinding with minimal slip: Snake and robot ascent of sandy slopes". Science. 346 (6206): 224–229. arXiv: 1410.2945. Bibcode: 2014Sci...346..224M. doi: 10.1126/science.1255718. PMID 25301625. S2CID 23364137 . Retrieved 2016-05-04. When we replaces the wiring, we just twisted the end of the electrical piece and the wire together to connect the circuit. If you can, we recommend soldering these pieces together, it will create a stronger bond and be less likely to break. We needed to return some of our materials to the classroom, so we twisted the wiring together and wrapped each end in electrical tape to hold the bond together. When setting up multiple sensors, just use the same circuit example as the first one. Each sensor must have its own line to power and ground and cannot be a part of the same circuit; this will make finishing the snake easier in future steps. Also, make sure your resistors are the same, since this affects the analog readings, we need all the sensors to be reading similar values.