Day 13: In which we work in the field

Here is our finished robot. His name is Rollo. Today we worked mostly in the field trying to get our functions to conform to what we needed. It would be an understatement to say that some work was put in over the weekend. A LOT of work was put in over the last weekend and previous days to get us to where we are now. Tomorrow we have a work day, which you can see the fruits of our labor down below.

Day 12: In which we code and play with the sonar

For most of today, I coded and Sarah was still working on our line sensor. However, near the end of class we got the sonar which we were able to get ready to mess around with the next day. The sonar worked perfectly. It was very accurate and simple to use. As for coding, I worked on it diligently. Having not coded in C, I think I did very well. I think the main thing is having basic computer science logic knowledge. That is the most important part.

Day 11: In which boredom overcame as we attempted to solve problems

Frustration overcame us as we continued working on coding. This is all that we saw. The firmware for the arduino wasn't working and we didn't know why. It would get to 98% then stop. We finally figured out that the arduino was dead. We don't know how, but it was. We tried to use Sarah's Arduino (which had already been pronounced dead) and it worked. I find it necessary to only bring up one picture because this is all we saw for the whole class period. There was nothing else to show. Very frustrating..

Day 9: In which we make sensors for the bot

Today we made some sensors. I worked on making the 2 flame sensors while Sarah worked on the line sensor. We later found that putting the the phototransistor in backwards would give us a better range of readings.

This is the line sensor that Sarah made. We had many, many problems with this once we decided that the leads needed to be longer. We needed to extend the wires so it would reach the board, but we kept getting dead wires because the wires were very small. We pretty much took the whole thing apart and did it over again.

Day 10: In Which we build out Vexduino

Today I soldered out vexduino while Sarah checked out our square bot and made sure all the bolts were tight and things were looking good. Sarah also put encoders on the bot so we could count the number of ticks and figure out how far we are moving. Unfortunately for us, we had a lot of problems making the Vexduino work. It was very, very frustrating. That being said, this was the only thing we did the whole class.

Day 8: In which we revive the square bot

Today we took out the square bots that we made and worked on driving it under a microcontroller. Since Sarah and I both have macs, we had to use the desktop in the classroom, which was sort of an inconvenience, but we made it work. We also put encoders on out bot and learned to drive the bot using Robotc. It was a fairly exciting day in my opinion. I have never coded in C but I found it really easy compared to Java.