I have found my Mindstorms kit and will loan the motors and sensors to expand our capability. Inevitably it was in the very last box, right at the back, after moving and opening 20 other boxes….. The new project resources are: 3 more motors, another touch sensor, another ultrasonic sensor, a light sensor and a sound sensor.
Colour sensor testing
Today in Coding, I did some tests with the robot, and recorded some data with the Colour Sensor. The results were that the colours were:
Red gives [ 5, 659, 359, 331, 210]
Blue gives [ 2, 370, 390, 480, 170]
Yellow gives [ 4, 680, 620, 410, 133]
Green gives [ 3, 370, 480, 351, 140]
White gives [ 6, 670, 645, 583, 196]
Black gives [ 1, 274, 246, 205, 81]
Blu Tack
Blu Tack is a valid material for a prototype!
Brainstorm
With a power and network outage, Ultron had a brainstorming session on his chosen challenge, “up the garden path”. He came up with loads of good ideas, some of which had to be discarded once we ran through the rules, especially the ones that were a bit too “Ultron”, such as very subtle changes in the colour of the line that the robot could see but the judge viewing the video might not !
Wait soon over!
Spiderman did some prototyping with the Lego to produce a catapult arm – simple testing demonstrated it needed to be longer, the change duly being made.
Waiting…
The craft department created our Feed the Fish target very efficiently back in January. It has been waiting so long to be fired at by a robot, that it has been repurposed as a fruit bowl.
Up the garden path
For my challenge, up the garden path, I wrote down the algorithm in my project notebook:
- Following the boundary between black and white.
- If the robot sees white it goes forward and curves to the left until it sees black.
- If the robot sees black it goes forward and curves to the right until it sees white.
11 school weeks to go…
Pi Report
I discussed how to get the robot to the firing line and what projectile I’m firing and how I am firing it.
Editor’s note: Thanos also documented a high level design for his program and investigated and tested some promising Lego components.
Not the competition robot…
Year 7 and 8s having been getting up to speed with our old “camjam3” robot. Most of this year’s Pi Wars team have used this robot in the past. Brilliantly engineered chassis of foam board and sticky tape.
