Snail Painter A invention report

My first idea was to use spray paint with a straw attached to the nozzle because I thought the spray paint would help the invention be more simple and the straw would help us not make a mess. But then I found out that we weren't allowed to use spray paint, so that idea went out the window.

Then me and my group came up with the idea to make the robot look like a snail and make the snail robot drag a paintbrush on the paper to make art.

The idea

Then we just started built something that brings our idea to life:

Left: the front of the prototype Right: bottom/back of the prototype with the sponge brush

The first prototype didn't have any motors in it, but after we finished making that first prototype we decided to replace the wheels with a motor so that it can move without us moving it.

Then we started to build the final version of the robot. We put a cardboard shell on top of a more 3-D version of the prototype to house the hummingbird. ( I don't have a picture of it so here is a sketch)

Final version 1.0

At this point we still didn't have any motors or anything inside the robot so it was just a shell.

Then we had the idea of having a little box that stored extra paint in the shell so that the robot didn't run out of paint. The box would have a straw that would drip paint onto the sponge brush.

Final version 2.0

But by then we decided that we were going to put the hummingbird inside the body, so then we would have to make holes in the body and lead the straw through the body to drip onto the sponge brush. The straw idea didn't work the way we wanted so we just decided to not do that and just add paint to the sponge brush ourselves.

Later, we moved the sponge brush to the front of the snail robot because that was where the motor was going to be. The motor was going to be attached to the sponge brush so then it looked like this:

Final version 3.0

With the final version we just kept testing it to make little changes in how the motor moved to change what the paint strokes looked like.

Final version 3.0 in action

In the end, I felt like very happy to know that I could actually make a robot that did something. I also felt very accomplished after this project because I didn't think I would be able to learn this so fast and I used to think this kind of stuff was super hard to learn.

Other people's robots made very different art compared to ours and the robots looked very different from ours. Some splattered paint while others made artsy circles.

I think our robot was successful because it made art like it was supposed to and it looks great too! I'm not exactly sure what we should do with sensors and motors next but I think we should make a robot competition, to see who makes the best robot.

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