Sensors! Perhaps the most important part of a good MicroMouse. Without good "vision", your mouse, much like a human, will run into the wall. Our first prototype, which competed in the April 8th IEEE Competition, had very poor vision. We used a combination IR transmitter and IR receiver from Liton. We found the receiver to be too sensitive for our application. The focus of the receivers were to broad, picking up just about every beam of modulated IR emitted from the diodes. In other words, The front sensor could pick up IR bouncing off the Right and left walls. This of course is Very BAD!!! Dirty Rat would make complete 180 degree turns whenever it pleased.

2 weeks later, after hours of research, we located a great set of sensors. The Sharp GP2A22 IR from Reptron Reflective sensors are a complete IR emitter and receiver filtered through a lens. The sensors have approximately a 2 cm sensing distance with a digital output.

For our motors, we used modified servo motors from Parallax. They came with the BoeBot kit and carry many advantaged and disadvantages.

1) Easy to control. If you are new to motor control, servo's are a good place to start. This is the very reason why Parallax uses them in their learning kits.

2) Low power consumption.

1) Without wheel encoders, it is very tough to tell if you are going strait.

2) Our specific motors were slow. However, if we had gone any faster with these motors, we would probably have ended up in the wall.