[this is school]

So yesterday was our mini culmination (take 2) and we did really well!! Everything fit together perfectly and we were able to get 3 pieces to our Mars base!! Two things were transported by the catapult and rover, and the other by parachute, RobotixX, and the balloon propulsion thing. I think we did really good and I think we made significant progress since the first run! YAY!!

Labels: M2M

Today, Hannah and I got the balloon propulsion thing to work!!!! First we had to repair the basket because somehow it had gotten left on top of the file cabinets and had gotten slightly damaged.. With a little bit of hot glue, and a bit of tape, the basket was as good as new! Then we just started with small objects, sending them back and forth.. And it worked really well. And the good thing was our basket and stuff was light enough that we only needed one balloon! Things are working great and it's all coming together.. Lena also decided that for the basket, it might be easier if she built on out of non-lego materials so it could be bigger and lighter. I think this mini culmination will work really well!

Labels: M2M

Today, we found out that we'll be doing our mini culmination again.. and if we could do anything to fix it, we could do it now. Since the robot was working fine now, Hannah and I volunteered to help with the balloon propulsion system with propelling the object in the basket from one side to another. Today, we re-assigned jobs and went over what could be fixed, and what didn't need more work. I traded with Amalia so she could be communications at the Mars base this time and I could work on the balloon thing. By the end of the class, we had a clear idea of what needed to be done, and had started fixing things up.. I also helped Lena with making a bigger basket for the rover.. That's it for today!

Labels: M2M

I think we did a pretty good job.. and it turns out, my rover never had to go because we never got to that station.. We were sending an object from the Phobos base down to the Mars base.. but in the process of transporting the object, the robotixx machine started to lose battery power! that wasn't what we had anticipated.. but I think we did fine anyway.. we did better that some groups.. As for the catapult, the object kept barely missing the rover's basket.. At my base (Mars Base) things were busy with talking to the other bases and figuring out missing parts and which base they'd go to/ which base had them. I thought overall, it went well and I liked it! : )

Labels: M2M

Today, Hannah decided to make the basket for the robot while I continued to grapple with the programming and the robot. I think the program worked better today and went a little smoother.. but I think I'll still work on it in homework center to work out anything else that might be wrong with it. I'm a little worried about the actual mini culmination because we haven't practiced all the programs working together and today was the last in class day. But I talked to people in other groups, and they said they hadn't practiced either.. Not to say that's an excuse.. We still don't have the basket done, even though my partner was supposed to work on it the whole class.. (which was kind of frustrating..) I think things will work ok for mini culmination.. And, I've come to the conclusion on the robot, that as long as it goes straight, and goes from base to base, when it it needs to turn around, instead of the robot doing it, the person at the base can simply turn it around and restart it in the other direction.. I think it would work better because even though the rover is programmed to turn around on it's own, it has trouble with it, given the surface it's on (I think).. And instead of wasting time and waiting for the rover to turn itself around and go back, we can just pick it up, turn it around, and send it back. I'm not too worried about the culmination..


PS. I made a basket in homework center with legos.. even though it's not that big, I think it should be fine..

Labels: M2M

Today, I worked on programming the robot and using the light censor. My partner didn't really seem to understand how things worked, so I did a lot of explaining and stuff along with trying to focus on programming. Most of class, I worked alone while my partner floated between other groups. I asked a lot of questions and fixed a lot of stuff with the robot.. I didn't realize how much more complicated my program was going to be! My program was made up of 2 loops.. One loop was the motion of going forward and keeping on the black line.. The other loop was once it reached the end of the white line, it would turn around and go back on the same line. The thing I'm having problems with now is getting the robot to start.. It takes either a few minutes of waiting for it to start, or flipping through each of the 5 programs to get the robot running before my program will start. It's a little annoying sometimes because of that. I'm still going to work on it in homework center to see if I can get it to start any faster and to work more on the second loop of the program. ( the turning around and then going straight.) I feel very stressed out right now because I feel like I'm not getting as much help as I'd like from my partner and my team.. but, I'm going to stick with it and see where this will take me..

Labels: M2M

Today, Hannah and Lucy switched AGAIN. So, Hannah's my partner again.. We messed around with the program a little more.. And got it working a little better. We still had a little trouble with the program once it was uploaded. For example, we would upload it, and it would tell us it would be on one of the programs, and when we ran it, it wasn't on any of the programs... After we asked Bert, Hannah and I got it running again, but it was running really slow. So we decided to take out the rods fastened to the sides of the bot because it seemed like the rubber tread was rubbing against the rods, making it turn slower. After this change, things were moving much better... The only problem, we later realized, was that when we were fixing it and securing things down, sometimes the rover would kind of break and collapse! So, between programming, we also were fixing and stabilizing the rover. Soon, another class was coming to an end and there's still a lot of work to be done. And again, I'll be working more on it in homework center..

Labels: M2M

Today, Lucy and Hannah traded jobs, so now Lucy's my partner.. We decided it would be easier to use a color censor instead of guessing times and speeds. What the color censor would do is: We can program it to follow the black line, and when it hits white, stop, turn, and get back on the black line. It was working fairly well on this loop that we were testing it on until, our rover ran out of battery power and we had to change batteries.. After that, things started going down hill.. Whenever we tried loading our program on the rover, it wouldn't upload it, or it would make us download this program that took like 10-15 minutes to download. After trying to download our program onto the rover multiple times, and downloading some other program onto the computer twice, class was coming to an end and both Lucy and I were frustrated with it. After school I'm going to work on the robot program more to see if I can get it to work any better. I wonder why it won't work!?!

Labels: M2M

oh gosh... I'm a little behind on this.. ( I didn't know we were supposed to be blogging this) So here I go.. I'm in the mini culmination group A1 and I'm working with Hannah to program the lego robot to go 15 feet.. stop, turn around, and go back. Today, I started to do a program after we had a group meeting to divide up tasks.. I'm also going to be a communications person at one of the bases.. The only thing I think is going to be hard about the robot programming, is figuring out the time for it to go from one place to another and at what power level. That's it for today!

Labels: M2M