This project was designed and built for my A-level electronics coursework in 2002. It uses a PIC microprocessor, a variety of sensors and motors fitted to a LEGO forklift model. The forklift is not a standard LEGO kit, rather built from a variety of parts I had. The vehicle has independently driven left and wheels, and a third motor to raise and lower the hoist. Construction includes the odd bit of hot-melt glue and blue-tak where 'traditional materials' weren't quite up the job. Since this was a school project these a reasonable Project Report below detailing construction, design calculations and construction.

To enable the microprocessor to control the vehicle, there are a good number of sensors:

Prototype boards are mounted at the rear of the vehicle and support four main functions:

The PIC is a 40-pin model clocked at 20Mhz by a Quartz crystal, more than ample for the job. It was programmed in PIC assembler using a TK3 Assembler/flasher  made from a kit purchased from Everyday Practical Electronics (EPE) Magazine. The assembly language software (fork2.asm) is attached to download.

This was basically a fairly decent LEGO sensors/programming solution years before the Lego Mindstorm kits!

We took a couple of videos back in 2001 on a very early digital camera, recording directly onto floppy disks - those were the days! You can see the machine run through basic states, causing the truck to lower the hoist, roll forwards until it picks up a pallet and then lift.