Full Speed Ahead Lab #1

1. What happened when you ran the program?
        -One the left wheel moved.
2. Which motor spun?
          - Port C, the one to the left wheel.
3. What direction did the motor spin?
          -Forward
4. Did the motor stop spinning on its own?
          -Yes, after a while. Maybe it was just coasting to a stop.
5. Is this the desired behavior yet?
           -No, not yet.
6. Why is the second motor command needed?
           - With only one motor command the robot will only turn in circles, so the second motor command keeps the robot going forward.
7. Why did the robot not stop at the right place before?
            - It was commanded to coast, not brake.
8. What is the difference between downloading a program and running a program? When do you need to do each one?
           - Downloading a program is setting something up and putting it into the machine. Running a program means having a device follow the commands I've programmed.
9. Which of the following determines the order in which blocks are fun in the program? Circle one.
           - b. the order of blocks on the white Sequence beam. The program starts at the small NXT symbol, and follows the blocks in the order they are reached along the white beam.
10. Write a brief one or two sentence explanation of what each block does in the program describe in wrote.
         1. First block: The first block is a motor block. It is telling the left wheel to go forward at a certain amount of speed.
        2. Second block: The second block is also a motor block. It is doing the same thing as the first block, but it's communicating with the right wheel in port B.
        3. Third block: The third block is a wait block. It tells the wheels how many rotations to wait.
        4. Fourth block: The fourth block is a motor block that tells the left wheel to brake.
        5. Fifth block: The fifth block is another motor block that tells the right wheel to brake.
11. look at your program.
 a. Which icon or icons in the program controlled how fat the robot went before stopping?
              -The wait block, i think. it would make more sense that the motor blocks told the robot how far to go, but i messed around with the wait block and i think that's what controls the rotations.
b. Explain how you could change the program to make the robot go a longer or shorter distance.
             - The wait block tells the wheels how many degrees to rotate, so i could program the wait block to go more degrees or less degrees.
12. Describe the robot's new movement pattern if you moved the motor plug from Port B to Port A, but did not change the program. How would you then need to change the program to make the robot go forward again?
            - If i moved the motor plug from Port B to Port A the robot would not be able to move its right wheel. I'd need to change the program to make the Port A control the movement of the right wheel.
13. Describe the robot behavior that this program produces when run
             - Well, the robot will go forward for a certain amount of time, and then stop.
14. How far will the program shown below make the robot run? Look carefully, this is trickier than it seems!
              - The robot will go forward 1,440 degrees and then stop.
15. What program blocks are different between the moving forward and moving backward behaviors?
              - The direction arrows are different.
16. Did your robot perform both actions as expected? If not, what did it do instead?
               - Well, it didn't do what I wanted at first. It wouldn't go backwards, and then it would go backwards too far. I just had to reprogram it.
17. Why did the rotation sensor need to be reset?
              - The robot would go forward º720, and then go backward º1,440 to the  -º720 mark. I reset the sensor to 0 after the robot went forward º720 so that the robot would end where it started.
18. When do you need to do this in future programs?
              - um, well I'll probably need to do it it i want the robot to pick something up and then carry it back.
19. Why doesn't the robot go exactly the same distance every time?
             - Sometimes the robot slips, or gets stuck on paper or something of the sort.
20. Why doesn't the robot go perfectly straight?
            - I had a cord running down and touching one of my wheels. It kept sticking and keeping the wheel from rotating so my robot was going a bit crooked.