Week Ten - Monday: Halloween Hindrances

Our robot has been giving us a few issues, and I've scientifically deduced that the cause of it is a Halloween curse. Our arm isn't long enough to reach the top of the array of pipes, a few screws popped off the robot, and the arm is moving with too much power, so we have to tone it down. Thankfully, all of these issues have simple solutions. We just have to make the arm longer, tighten the screws, and lower the amount of power on the arm's motor.

Week Nine - Friday: Arm Yourself With an Arm!

We've attached the arm to our robot and we also attached the motor to the arm. Our arm uses a series of gears to move the arm upwards by using the motor to move axles. Our design is standard and our goal is simple, use an arm to get tetrahedrons on top of an "obstacle". We hope to complete the challenge within two weeks,

Week Nine - Monday: Tetrahedron Turmoil

Today we've begun the construction of the arm meant for the completion of the tetrahedron challenge. The tetrahedron challenge involves using an arm on your robot to place tetrahedrons on a design of pipes, with various higher spots on the construction of pipes earning you a greater sum of points. This challenge is going a lot smoother than the chair challenge, now that we finally have functioning motors.

Week Eight - Friday: Out With the Old, In With the New

We decided that the the method we were previously using of going around the chairs in a rectangular motion was ineffective and that it would be much easier to simply make a program that would make the robot go in a circular rotation around the chair. Our theory was right, with a few simple attempts we were able to make the robot go around the chairs with ease.

Week Eight - Monday: (Contrary to Popular Belief) Opposites Don't Attract

This week we've run into yet another issue that's hindering our progress in this project. Due to the fact that one of our prior motors malfunctioned, we've had to replace it with the only motor that was left available to us, a motor of smaller size, which causes a major issue. Due to the fact that one motor is smaller and has less power than the other, there's an imperfection in the balance of the two motors. Therefore, instead of having perfect values for the code to get the robot to turn, we have to arrange the code in different random values that aren't in any set pattern. To solve this, we're going to begin repairing a motor and swapping it onto our robot.

Week Seven - Friday: Trial & Error

Today we continued our progress on the squarebot challenge. Our method of discovering the best values for the code is to continuously change numbers by small degrees, test the robot by making it go around the chairs, and evaluating points of error during the robot's program sequence. This method can best be described as trial and error, however, I would describe each attempt as success, not error. This is because with each attempt, we come closer to passing our final goal of getting the robot around the chairs.

SolidWorks

Week Seven - Monday: The Art of Finessing

This week we are continuing our objective of utmost importance, the completion of the autonomous chair challenge. The values in our code are slightly off, the robot has managed to make it around the chairs twice but always seems to collide with the chair's leg on the third time around. We've survived two broken motors throughout the entire process, so we can easily fix a few simple values in code. By the end of this week, we should be finished.

Week Six - Friday: Functionality Aquired

We finally have gotten both sides of our robot to function properly. The motor was perfectly fine this time around, the problem was just that the motors were plugged into the incorrect ports, and one of the ports on our cortex seems to be damaged. Now that both sides are working properly, we can return to the challenge. We switched the robot back from joystick controls to autonomous after showing Mr. Martin that it's functioning properly, and despite all of it's apparent flaws, we see hope in this robot yet again. By next week we plan to complete the challenge and eventually join the Starstruck Competition.

Week Six - Monday: Recovery and Revitalization

Our time to work this week is cut down by an unfortunate turn of events, Hurricane Matthew is heading towards Florida, and school will be closed on Thursday and Friday. We'll use the short amount of time we have to work as efficiently as possible. We've finally replaced the motor, but our code is faulty and only one side of our robot is working still. It feels almost as if our robot is cursed, but we're engineers, we don't believe in the supernatural & superstitions, we believe in science & solutions. Today we worked on our code, tried to find the issue with our robot, and set up our batteries to charge at the end of class, and tomorrow we'll isolate the issue that seems to persist.