One morning I woke up thinking,
“Let’s build a robot that follows my phone.”
And hey — it kinda works.
Using a GPS module, the robot could figure out where it was…
But it had the directional sense of a confused pigeon.
So I added a compass! Easy.
Writing the code for it? It was like untangling spaghetti. While blindfolded. During an earthquake.
Eventually… It turns!
Only one tiny issue: It never stops turning. Basically a break-dancer on wheels.
After I fixed the spinning problem, it just… kept going.
Straight off into the sunset.
One missing digit in the coordinates and the thing was basically en route to Mars. I’m expecting a selfie with the Curiosity rover any day now.
After some “gentle” encouragement and a lot of debugging, I realized that when I plotted coordinates manually, the robot tracked almost perfectly.
Phone tracking, though? Let’s just say it plays hide-and-seek…and it’s really good at hiding. Always at least 10 meters off.
So how does this chaos even work? I built a mobile app that sends the phone’s coordinates via Bluetooth to the microcontroller. The robot uses its GPS and compass to calculate the heading and distance and then drives toward the target. At least, in theory.
By this point, my motivation was low. My sanity? Questionable.
But somehow… progress happened.
I tweaked the phone’s location sensor —and suddenly, I’ve got a robot that follows my phone!
