Weekend Project - Photopopper

One of the current geek things to do is see what you can fit in an altoids tin. One of my friends had a similar tin that I was playing with awhile ago. He saw me playing around with it and challenged me to come up with something.

Well I've failed. It doesn't fit in the tin.

But it was still great fun to work on! And it's the perfect weekend project.

So what am I talking about? It's Solarbotics BEAM photopopper photovore. That's a mouthful, so let's break it down; it's a robot that follows the light. I got the design from the Solarbotics page, where you can buy a kit from them, although I just purchased the components on my own, as I wanted to fit them in the tin. 

Here's the picto-breakdown - scroll all the way to the bottom for a video!

It's best to build the circuit on a prototyping board to
make sure everything works. If not, it's easy to fix here.

Once it's working, you can solider it together.

Finally, we use some double-sided tape to attach the shell.

The tabasco robot! It's hard shell protects
it from many natural predators.