The Plan
In December 2023, we wanted to make something special for the Terrible Ideas Hackathon.
Earlier in the year, in anticipation of a similar project, we had purchased a couch from Facebook Marketplace for $1. The week before the hackathon, we happened to come across a broken electric wheelchair. Naturally, we decided to combine the two in a bit of a non-standard manner: Each side of the couch would be controlled by a separate controller, for a truly terrifying bonding experience.
The Build
Given 48 hours, there's no way we can get any new components shipped to us. This led us to make some questionable design decisions in order to get the couch moving. We used the motors and suspension from the wheelchair to drive the couch, stealing two motor controllers from some ancient e-scooters we had lying around. We used 4x 12V lead acid batteries to power the motors, over-volting them by a significant margin.
We went fully split-brained for the controllers, with two separate Arduino Nanos and two old RC car controllers manually soldered and wired up.
William Osman's Visit
In our first week at the University of Auckland, William Osman came to see the couch. We were very unprepared - we drove the couch down to Auckland in a trailer two days before, and the lead-acid batteries crushed all the circuitry (lesson learned: don't ship lead-acid batteries next to delicate electronics). We had to fully rebuild the control module in one day, leading to some issues during his visit. Despite this, we had a great time showing him around the university on wheels, and he ended up making a second-channel video featuring us!
The Couch vs Cardboard Forts
In collaboration with the University of Auckland's Maker Club, they challenged our couch to a duel against their cardboard forts.
Gallery
