Love Sosa

We continued to have problems with our robot. And we had to make adjustments to the rubber rollers and to the motors. We also had problems with the weight of robot. One side was too heavy which made the robot fall forward when it picked up the ball, so we had to come up with a way to add weight on the other side or remove some weight. Ion figured out a way to center the weight and now the robot works. We have finished our Racket ball challenge and now the  are on the autonomous. Where we have to do the exact same thing, but the robot has to do it by itself.

We are still having trouble building the robot, we have also been in and out of exam testing, so we have, and will be barely in class this week and the next. We are still working on the "scooper" part of the robot and we have added the extra motor. We also have remembered that we have to keep a look out for the battery voltage levels.                               

We started assembling our parts and adding a "scooper" like curve at the end of the robot's arm. We are trying our best to think about what would be best for the robot without having to rebuild it over and over. Our plan is to use rubber rollers that will help the ball roll smoothly toward the robot instead of away from it. 

Today we called for a official for the tetrahedron and now we will begin working on the next challenge. In this challenge we have to scoop of a ball and drop it inside a pole. Unlike the other challenges this one might give us a few problems. Today we started off with taking off the previous challenges' parts and started gathering materials for the new challenge.                                         

                              completed the autonomous. At first we were having a small problem because the robot arm would slam hard and the tetrahedron would fall on the floor instead of on the pole. We found the problem and noticed on of the screws were too loose and needed to be tightened and then it started working. So now we are done with this challenge and next week we will do a final call for Mr Martin. 

     This week we will start o the autonomous. The most import thing about this challenge is the coding. Our goal is to do the exact same thing as the last challenge, however the robot has to do it by itself. We have figured out the coding and today we started programming it and testing it out on the robot. 

We finished our challenge 40 seconds in. It was surprisingly not as hard as the last one. But next week we will start a new challenge, the Autonomous. In this challenge, we have to do the exact same thing with the tetrahedron, but the robot has to be programmed to do it by itself. Since it is a short week, when we come back on Monday we will get right started with programming the robot and hopefully we finish this challenge as fast as we did the last one.

Today we worked on the rebuilding of our robot. We looked at the criteria and realized that the length of the tip of our robot was to big so we bent it backwards to become shorter. Since reducing the tip size made the robot shorter, we added two extra bars at the base of the robot to add the height so that it could still reach the top of the pole.

 We have finished our robot, tetrahedral, and our solid works.           We have done practice runs of the challenge and when Mr. Martin comes back we will do our official run. This challenge wasn’t that hard for us so we are excited to see what’s next.                             

  This week we are focusing on making our own tetrahedral, the motors are connected and the robot is build, but we have to make our own tetrahedral to do the challenge. We are thinking of building it through Solid works and printing it out, or we could build it out of straws. Regardless, we will try both ways to see which works best.                                 

We are basically done with the structure and addition of the claw. We are currently adding extra support to the back of the bot and adding the motor. Today went pretty smoothly, the only trouble we were having was deleting the old program and connecting the robot back to the controller. While I finish building on to the robot, Roche will program the new motor, and Ian is working on our new Solid Works. 

We are back from spring break and this week we are continuing to work on adding the claw to our robot to finish our next challenge. In the next challenge we must have our robots, pick up two tetrahedral shaped objects and place them on a pole in under a minute. For extra credit we can do 3 or 4 tetrahedral but we have to make it ourselves. So this week we will be adding on to the structure of our robot. 

            Today we started on our new challenge. We are asked to add a claw or some sort of lever to pick up two tetrahedral figures and stack them one by one on top of pipes. Although we have started this week, we are going to be on spring break from 3/22- 4/1. When we get back we will finish our assembly and proceed to finishing the challenge.                               This picture above shoes the shape of the object we have to make and use to place on the poles.

  WE FINALLY FINISHED. After long, stressful weeks of work. Our group has finally finished our figure 8 challenge. I am very happy and proud of our group for their motivation and their ability to keep trying. While some groups completely gave up, we continued to try and complete this assignment.                                                        

                                    We still haven’t got this robot working. The robot is currently at a point where instead of working consistently, sometimes it will finish completely and other times it messes up at the most random spots. So our focus is to fix all issue so that it works perfectly every time. We are working very hard to finish it especially because next week will be our last week here before we go on to spring break. 

  This week we have learned new information on why our robot may be acting up. The battery. We have learned that the battery's voltage level can affect how fast or slow the robot runs and the amount of power that it has to turn. With this knowledge we have created a "safe range" between 8.0-8.3. If our battery's voltage is higher or lower than this range, the robot will not do the specific angles and measurements that we have programmed. Because we've learned this, it has been easier and way less stressful to keep the robot consistent.

Yesterday in study hall Roche was able to finish coding the figure 8 on the robot and it worked perfectly. For some reason when we came in today the robot was completely wack. It wasn't turning at the specific angles programmed, we had no idea why, in one day, the robot went completely wrong. We tried tightening the wheels, restarting the system, and charging the batteries. It has been a very stressful week but we still have hope to finish this challenge.

This week our goal is to finally complete the figure 8 challenge and start on something new. Today when we started for some reason, our robot was completed out of control. Instead of going forward, or doing the specific movements we programmed, the robot would spin in circles by itself. For awhile we thought it was something wrong with the motors, we even took it apart and fixed one of the axles on the wheels. Nothing worked! we finally asked one of the seniors in our class for help and of course, they found the issue. For some reason the coding website had some issue working and we had to take certain steps to reset it.

This week our goal was to complete our weekly challenge. After we were done building we were suppose to program and code our robot to run a figure 8 twice around two chairs by itself. Unfortunately we have not finished the challenge in time. We have succeeded on getting the robot complete the figure 8 once, however when we tried to duplicate the same codes, our robot started to malfunction. Even though we didn’t finish this week, next week our goal is to complete it as soon as possibly and start on the next challenge.

Last week we finished building our robot. This week our focus is coding. Our  challenge  of the week is to get our robot to run by itself and do a figure 8 around two chairs twice. Today we started the basic coding with going straight and turning. 

 We’ve Finished!!!! After a long week of mistakes we have finally finished the assembly of the BEGINNING of our robot. We have connected the motors and controller to the frames and the robot is now able to move under our control. There are a few adjustments we have to make such as adding extra security and a battery clip, but we have succeeded in meeting our personal goal and we are very excited.

Today we have downloaded the square-bot assembly file off of the engineering site. We have started gathering materials such as chassis rails and bumpers, screws, beams, nuts, wheels and motors. Today we went in order of the instructions and started on the frame of the robot. By the end of the week our goal is to be completely done with the frame, motor and wheel install and have are robot up and moving. 

After finishing the virtual build on Solidworks, today we started building our actual robot. We did a test bench where we updated the firmware of the cortex. We tested batteries, the motors and cortex and connected the controller to the dual motors. We learned how to use Robot IC which the software to control the cortex and we updated it. 

  2/11/19 This week our main goals are to start building. We have already chosen our bot style(square) and downloaded the parts needed to build it virtually.` Today Ian will continue to finish the virtual robot build on Solidworks. After finishing the build we will go to the back and start working our robot.

2/7/19 This is still the first week and the second day of working on the robots. Roche and I (Ian) have assigned are selves to be the people working on building the robot virtually on SolidWorks and we alternate when ever we get tired. From this day on Abrianna will be updating the blog and taking picture of what is currently happening. We have decode that we are going to be doing the square bot just because it is the easiest to find the parts for. We had to download it from the vex website and open them with Solidworks to  convert the STEP file into a Solidworks parts file to make the assembly. So far we converted most of the part and have gotten half of the frame done.

week 1 2/5/19 Today our main goal was to start up our Blogger pages and complete a bio page for all of our team members(which are Ian Alejandro, Abrianna something and Roche something. After finishing our first post we continued to re-inventory and organize all of our tools and toolboxes and carts in the back of the room. By the end of the week our goal is to be completely done and start building our virtual robot in Solidworks, which would be the square bot, and hopefully by next class start building the frame and setting setting up for the rest of the quarter.