Written by: Jasper M-W
2 minutes to read
2023-12-10
Building a Motorised Couch
For the December 2023 Terrible Ideas Hackathon, my team aimed for a long-attempted project: building a motorised couch. A few teams had tried building their own over the years, each attempt accumulating more necessary parts before fading away.
Now, a high-speed couch isn’t a terrible enough idea on its own — we needed to go deeper. Introducing: a collaborative driving experience. You now only get to control one side of the vehicle; the other side is controlled by your enemy. You must agree on exactly where to go and be perfectly in tune with each other in order to get anywhere.
(Loud volume warning – “Artistic Intent”)
The Build
We had no chance of shipping in new parts in time during the competition, so we had to work with the parts we already had at the lab:
- A couch donated for this exact project a few years ago
- A salvaged wheelchair frame with four somewhat matching brushed motors
- Two scrapped brushed electric scooter beasts, from before scooters became popular and refined
- A pile of 12V lead-acid cells that were donated from the local hospital UPS systems
- A box full of RC remotes from a separate project that replaced the remote control with a local AI
- All the basic electronics we could need
The wheelchair motors were repaired, and the frame was cut in half. The two halves were bolted to each side of the couch frame. The motors were driven by two of the salvaged electric scooter motor controllers, which were powered by a 48V lead-acid battery bank. Those motor controllers were plugged into an Arduino each, with an RC controller trigger wired into each.
All of the electronics were stuck into a briefcase bolted to the underside of the couch for easy maintenance. Underglow, and speed animations around each motor was added for the all important flair.
