Niveus is a remote controlled snowblower I designed in a group of 14 for MIT's Mechanical Engineering senior product design class, 2.009. We took a commercial CubCadet Snowblower, replaced the human pusher and handle with some hefty screwdriver motors and a joystick controller. For remote control we used a First Robotics controller board with a Basic Stamp. It was quite satisfying to see it all work. If you are interested check out our promotional video of Niveus in action.

My contribution was primarily electronics: wiring up a 12V car battery, GM alternator, additional motor controllers and safety switches, as well as doing nifty things like wiring the controller to a transistor to a relay to a solenoid to the starter motor to remotely start the engine. In order to remotely determine if the engine was running I used the preexisting handle-bar warming alternator as a hall-effect sensor and wrote some code to alert the user when the engine stalled and provided feedback that Niveus turned off when you requested. We also alerted the user with a flashing light when Niveus approached too close to a predefined boundary, like the edge of the driveway. This feature was accomplished by hacking apart a commercially available electric shock dog collar to detect proximity to a buried wire.

Collaborators: Alexandra Chau, Blair Connelly, Jen Fiumara, Judy Hsu, Maria-Lousia Izamis, Gina Kim, David Kordonowy, Kevin Lang, Linus Park, Marcos Rodriguez, Zia Sobhani, Josue Sznitman, Eli Winberg, Roger Yeh.