After shipping The Sims 4, I took a couple weeks off to relax. I spent a few days tooling around with different programming projects with the intention of making a small, highly constrained game. Unfortunately, I lost my motivation and became frustrated. I had this desire to be productive on my vacation and wouldn't let myself just sit and relax, which is what I really needed.

During this time, my girlfriend asked for my help with an art project. She wanted to do a piece commemorating The Iron Giant, an animated film from the late 90's, for an art gallery. Her idea was to show the giant looking for his lost pieces. These pieces pulsed with light, much like a hearbeat, and she wanted to capture this. She asked me if I could rig up some LEDs for her. I agreed and ended up having a huge amount of fun digging back into electronics, which was my second love (the first being video games). On a whim, I bought some hardware and started building myself a little robot. 10 days later, Cesar was born.

He's rather simple, but he's pretty good at navigating around the house. There are two infrared LEDs in front (the ones that look like eyes) which send out light pulses. Above those, he has infrared sensors. If the light hits anything it will reflect back and hit the sensors, causing him to realize that something is in the way. He will then attempt to avoid it. If that fails, the two metal wires in front will catch him. If they hit something, it'll cause him to back up.

He's not quite finished, but he's been a blast to play with! Maybe I'll upload a video one of these days.

Screenshots:

Credits:

• Programming and Hardware: David "Rez" Graham

Stats:

• Processor: ATmega328 (Arduino Uno)
• Language: C++
• Line count: 1079 across 15 source files
• Dev Time: About 10 days total for both hardware and software