An autonomous robot car built with Arduino that detects and avoids obstacles in real time using an HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor mounted on a servo motor. No remote control needed — it steers itself. Built with AFMotor, NewPing & Servo libraries
Used Claude in Readme.md
Nothing worked perfectly on the first try — and that’s kind of the point. The sensor kept randomly reading 0 cm and making the car stop for no reason, which was super frustrating until I figured out that 0 just means out-of-range and needed to be handled in code. The motors were also browning out the Arduino when they all kicked in at full speed at once, so I had to ramp the speed up gradually instead. Getting the servo to actually point straight ahead took way more trial and error than I expected — turns out “center” isn’t always 90° depending on how it’s mounted. And honestly, just keeping the wiring clean on a tiny chassis with four motors, a sensor, and a servo all fighting for space was its own challenge.
Honestly, this project taught me more than I expected. I finally understood why you can’t just plug motors straight into an Arduino — the motor shield thing clicked once I saw what happens to the voltage without it. I got way more comfortable reading circuit diagrams, working with libraries I’d never touched before, and understanding how tiny things like a 40ms delay can completely change how a robot behaves. Writing the logic that makes the car actually “decide” which way to turn felt really rewarding — it’s simple code, but seeing a physical machine react to its environment because of something you wrote is a different kind of cool.
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