Domino Robot

Everybody has ever built a path using domino pieces to overthrow the first piece and start a chain reaction, making fall all the pieces. There are kids who do this for fun and there are also people who dedicates a lot of time making structures and impossible paths, to film it or make a world record.

All of us have been kids and we love that spirit of experimenting, creating new things… And all the ideas need a first step.

Our first step is that, that gesture that makes the first piece fall.

The challenge that this course presents us is to build a robot capable of building paths of domino pieces according to a draw, done by the user.

We have divided the tasks in four big blocks, programming, mechanics, electronics, and documentation.

This document will contain explanations of what have we done and how.

We all agree that we selected this project because it looked funny and challenging, but we think that apart of domino buildings a similar robot can be used in an industrial way.

The project was born with an initial idea, during one of the first classes of Integrated Project 2. In the next lines we will explain how this idea has grown and how we developed our prototype.

This project has been done by four students of Mechatronics Degree in the Universitat de Vic, our names are Martí, Gabriel, Pau, and Oriol.

1 Motor step to step bipolar 1 A 16 Ncm Stepper Motor 42 x 20 mm 4 cables 

2 Arduino nano

3 OliYin 3pcs Male Deans T-Plug to Male JST Connector Adapter 3.93inch Heavy Duty 20awg Wire(Pack of 3)

4 OVONIC Batería Lipo 3s 11.1V 2200mAh 50C con Deans T Conector para RC Evader Bx Car RC Truck RC Truggy RC Airplane UAV Drone FPV

5 Drivers for the motors

6 Servomotor Parallax Inc, 4 → 6 V, 50 rpm, par máx. 27 Ncm

7 Voltage regulator module

8 The domino pieces to create the path (120 pieces)

9 Bluetooth module for conecting the mobile to the arduino

10 Wheels

11 Servomotor 9g 1,47Nm

12 arduino power charger

13 Cables to conect the battery and the VRM

Here we decide how the robot's gonna work, the mechanism to place the pieces, the supplies to build it.

Here we do some basic preparations, test the components individually to check if it is all ok, sold the pins on the Arduino nano. Mesure the domino pieces etc...

Here we design the electronics schematics, theese schematics will be important to follow in order to not spoil the prototype or curcircuit it.

Here we will post pictures of the design. We used PTC Creo as the major program to design a 3D model of our prototype.

We used Python and Arduino to be able to draw the lines the robot must follow and to communicate the PC with the robot. Here we can see a picture of the drawing canvas, the robot must be able to follow the path drawn.

Here we will upload videos of the testing part of the prototype.

We all have been kids and we love that spirit to discover new things and experiment. We all have ever built a domino path, piece by piece and we frustrated because the pieces fell halfway and we couldn't finish the work. So here we present our prototype. A robot capable of throwing domino pieces following a path drawn by the user.