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AmberandLorraineEggHuntPlan

Presentation

All the day long,
Whether rain or shine,
She's a part of the assembly line.
She's making history,
Working for victory,
Rosie the Riveter.
Keeps a sharp lookout for sabotage,
Sitting up there on the fuselage.
That little girl will do more than a male will do.
Rosie's got a boyfriend, Charlie.
Charlie, he's a Marine.
Rosie is protecting Charlie,
Working overtime on the riveting machine
When they gave her a production "E",
She was as proud as she could be,
There's something true about,
Red, white, and blue about,
Rosie the Riveter.
-Redd Evans and Jacob Loeb (1942)

Final Results

Strategic Plan

• We need to be able to tell the Create which color egg we were assigned. This should be set with a simple button push.
• The program needs to run for exactly two minutes. I think a stopwatch would be good.
• We need some way to find the ball. We could either use light sensors to look for the specific color or we could have it just drive randomly and just scoop as it goes. In that case, we would need the Create to be able to tell if it caught a ball then identify the color.
• If we decide not to scoop, we need another method to capture the balls. Servos?
• The Create needs to drive to the goal. We just need to modify the last lab for this.
• The Create needs to avoid bumps and cliffs without jumping out of its task.

 !Amber's Progress Summary

 

December 28th

• I have been working on modifying parts of my code from Lab 5 to make it work for the egg hunt. For the button press, I need just need to just redirect the Create's actions to the new code, when it is written. To get the the goal, I am using, for the most part, the exact same code from the last lab.
• I think we should have a device that acts much like a snow plow that scoops up eggs and then closes after a button switch his hit, which means there is an egg inside. I have drawn up some designs but have not began to program without talking to Lorraine first. I plan on working on that next week once I talk to her.

January 4th

• Lorraine and I have been going over some preliminary designs for our capturing mechanism. Lorraine is working on constructing a device like she envisioned and we plan on testing its effectiveness next week.
• Over the weekend, I plan to work on the program to identify our color ball. I did a test to see the values of the different colors on the photoresistors and IR distance sensors. The values of the IR sensor showed the greatest distance between colors, so that is what we will use in our lab. I need to test the contrast between the blue ball and the blue paint on the table's side on Monday.
• If I have extra time, I want to try to design an additional defensive device. I want to create a scoop that will pick up opponents' balls and toss them into the cargo bay for safe keeping.
• I'm a little behind schedule on the button press code and the goal making code. I'm having issues writing it into code when I don't know what the rest of the code will be. I might end up having to make each one into its own function to call later in the main code.

January 11th

• I figured out that one of the problems with using photoresistors is that the room light comes up with very similar values to the yellow ball. I attached lights to the sides of the photoresistors to brighten the balls and give more accurate values.
• No matter what I do I cannot get the lights to work. One of my original issues was using a port that was not able to use digital sensors, but I fixed that and now I can't figure out the problem. I wrote a small piece of code to get it working with the rest of the parts for the ball search commented out.
• Amber Preliminary Ball Finding Code
• Amber Ball Finding Set-up
• Amber Light Hook-up
• Amber Light and Photoresistor Set-up
• I plan to find the ball initially to have the Create rotate and look for the optimum sensor value for the chosen color and then drive towards it. I am using a method similar to light following to try to center the ball under the arm so it can be captured.

Practical Exam

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 !Lorraine's Progress Summary

December 28th

• I have been working on a flowchart for the lab, but I've been having problems incorporating all parts of the program- for example, making sure it doesn't crash into the wall. Most of the program, however is sequential- the robot only activates the scoop once it senses a ball, only goes to the goal once the scoop is activated, only opens the scoop once it reaches the goal.
• Instead of a snowplow, I was envisioning two rectangles with open sides that come together to trap the ball. However, using one motor might be simpler.

Jan 4

• This week I learned that it is always good to check in a box to see if all parts are there before taking the box home. (I took two servo motors home to discover that they were just spare parts boxes.
• Half way done constructing egg grabber, that'll be done this weekend (there wasn't enough time in class for the glue to dry).
• Big flowchart is done, this weekend I'll work on the wallfollowing flowchart.
• Soldering is a lot harder than it looks- apparently when I was trying to make the distance sensor wires longer, I short circuted them or something because when Amber was trying to run the sensor demo she discovered that it wasn't working.
• Goals for this weekend: Finish egg-catcher; Finish wall following flowchart;
• Goals for this week (when I get the robot): get wall following up and running(ish), write code for timer part of program;

Jan11

• So I realized that things glued and wired together aren't very stable, and decided to use K'Nex instead.
• I kept rebuilding, but now I have something that can easily come on and off the robot and is pretty durable (won't break during transport or spontaneously fall apart while the robot is running).
• Wall following is not up and running yet, but I have perfected the egg trap.
• For full details check out my Robotics Practical.

Lorraine's Progress.