Well Today I found out what my final project for robotics will be. I have to program my robot to go around a slanted table and knock off eight bottles of water. Except for this one special bottle of water that needs to be moved to the center of the table. It's worth 10 extra points if it gets to the center of the table. My robot can't be more than 25 cm long. Or is it 23 cm. Which ever. Also I get extra points if my robot does all of this within 60 seconds.
December 8: I don't even remember getting anything done today. I know that I did... but only in theory. I went out to the table where our obstacle course is and I took some readings on the light sensor to make a threshold, but then I came back and I just didn't feel motivated at all. I just want to sleep!!!
December 9: Greg is pissing me off. He's really funny, and he has some good ideas, but he also isn't very realistic. There's this problem with our robot making it over the pencils in the obstacle course, and so he decided that we just need a bigger front wheel. Whatever, if he has an idea why not run with it? But the modification he did with our robot is ridiculous! Now it can't even make it around the table. I almost forgot to mention that we have perfected the art of sensing the edge of the table... kinda. It only falls off sometimes. We made our arm with the light sensor longer, but when it turns corners sometimes it gets a bit too enthusiastic.
December 12: Today I came in to work on my robot tracking the edge of the table. Everything was correct with my programming. The threshold was right (i spent quite a lot of time taking thresholds) Mr. Hillier added these blocks to my line tracking program that would display the reading of the light sensor while the program was running. We were expecting this to tell us what our threshold was (if, for some reason, the thresholds were different when it was going around the table) but something crazy happened. The blocks that were supposed to give us the information to fix the program ended up fixing the program! It was pretty confusing, but hey, it was working so I didn't spend too much time trying to figure it out.
Also, I got my touch sensor to work. Mr. Hillier showed me a design concept that had the mechanism that would knock the bottles off attached to the thing that bumps the touch sensor. One problem I came across was that the thing that touches the sensor was too heavy, and when my robot was shaking and finding the line it would all of a sudden be bumped because of all the weight. I played around with the design and eventually I added two pieces that will stick out and touch the bottle but not accidentally touch the sensor.
I tried to go on to having my second light sensor sense the bottle wrapped in aluminum, but there's a problem with the threshold of the aluminum bottle and the threshold of the bottles wrapped in colored paper. They're too much alike so Mr. Hillier is going to take the bottles intended to be knocked off the table and wrap them in black.
Oh ya, and my robot stops running when it gets to the square of aluminum. It's pretty good at stopping... and falling off corners. I fixed the problem of not being able to go over the pencils, though. Mr. Hillier attached a motor to the back of my robot and that kinda helped but I attached another one on top of that (genius, if I do say so myself) and now there's no problem of it getting stuck... sometimes.
HAPPY DAY! It's been nearly three hours. So much has been accomplished and I can't wait for class tomorrow so I can keep improving my program.
December 13: Today was pretty cool. The robot was just going around, so cool stuff. I think the final will be pretty easy
December 15: When I got to study hall today Greg had put together a program that senses the aluminum bottle and knocks it to the left. We tried putting it in the sequence with everything else but now it doesn't work!
December 16: So today is the final exam. I thought it would be a really easy day since Sunday the robot was practically perfect. But now we're having problems up the yin-yang. Our robot won't make it past the final turn, and it knocks the aluminum bottle to the right. Eventually I just gave up on trying to get the aluminum bottle in the middle, we still passed.
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