New Guys

Today we will continue working on our robots arm. The challenge we're working on forces us to make sure that the arm is working properly and efficiently. Right now we're having problems with the arms motor and picking up the ball given to us. We will continue to work at it until we have it right.

We are so far figuring out a code for the robot to lift up the arm and drop the ball into the tube. We need to set it so it times it right. Everything has to line up the code for the motor to rotate the hand the the code for the other motor to lift up the arm and stay in place long enough.

So we got the robot to move forward and backwards but we couldn't get it to lift up the arm and spin to drop the ball. We need to figure out the buttons we need to use to the arm and claw to complete the challenge. This can be accomplished by changing the motors or ports.

We have been trying to figure out weather or not we want to either make a a new code or stick with the same one we used with slight variations. We need to get the arm up and make it so that the motor on the hand will spin the spinner in the claw and make the ball move. But we have to program different buttons to different things which is what eventually we will figure out.

Today is the start of the second quarter. Our new challenge  is getting our robot to drop a ball into a tube either manually or a utonomously. If we do it autonomously we only have to do it once but if we do it manually we have to do it twice in under a minute.

In this quarter two we stared the tube challenge which basically we have to figure out an arm to pick up the ball without the ball falling on the way up. Then programming it to do so. And then drop the ball into the tube. So what we did was we got a wide enough metal piece to bend and put an axial across the middle to hold the ball on the way up and we put sort of like spinners to push out the ball when it needs to be dropped.

We tried practicing the autonomous tetrahedron challenge twice and while we got the robot itself to move, the timing was way off. With a little bit more time and practice our robot should be able to complete the challenge in no time. The hardest part will most likely be re coding it.

So to program the robot so is able to pick up the tetrahedrons by itself we have to literally just change the codes. To do that we have to figure out which codes to use as well as figure out the right timing for the robot to move and lift up the arm. We also need to figure out how to code the arm so it goes up automatically.