ITAS152Lego

MindstormsProject Proposal

Group Members:

Paul MartinMickel Smith

William Hogeweide

themindstormproject.tk

The idea

Our original idea was to build a robot utilizing a lego mindstorms nxt. Once built it would perform various tasks utilizing the majority of its sensors.

the look

During our conception phase we all thought that the robot would look like johnny 5.

we soon realized that we were living in a fantasy world.

the other look

after several rebuilds and a few macguivers our final robot resembled frankenstein more then it did johnny 5.

what he lacks in looks he has in charisma.

time management

in order to try and ensure that we could accomplish everything in a reasonable amount of time, we created a time line.

The time line along with everything else can be viewed at our website: themindstormproject.tk

since we live quite a ways from one another we decided to comunicate through notes in a shared drop box folder.

The tasks

Original tasks:

1. locate a ball.

2. Decide if it’s red or blue

3. if red bring to a container if not throw away.

4. locate object that’s emitting sound and put it into the same container

the programming

in order to accomplish our tasks we chose to use the built in nxt gui system.

gui problems

as some of you may have come to realize, using the gui system isn’t as easy as you might have thought.

just trying to understand the system took quite some time.

couldn’t manipulate the program as freely as we thought.

gui problems cont.

for reasons unknown to us the program we created in the gui decided not to work and no amount of trouble shooting would make it either.

as a last minute decision and 2 weeks to go we decided to scratch our program and rewrite it using java.

java

java “thank you jeebus”.

once we figured out what methods were available to us through the api programming it seemed to be a breeze.

one of the tasks we wanted the nxt to do we still couldn’t get it accomplished even with java.

The final tasks

what we ended up with

1. locate a ball.

2. Decide if it’s red or blue

3. if red bring to a container if not throw away.

4. wait till you hear an alarm then locate ball and bring to a container.

sound problems

although we were able to get the sound sensor to work we were unable to get to be sensitive enough to know which direction the sound was coming from.

with that in mind we altered our original idea from:

locate object that’s emitting sound and put it into the same container.

wait till you hear an alarm then locate ball and bring to a container.

more problems

what we really wanted to happen, was to have the robot locate these objects no matter where they were put and put them into the container.

light sensor was not accurate enough. no matter what color the container the light reading was always to close to either ball.

group problems

like all groups we have had our share of problems.

One of our members got really ill and missed quite a bit of class which hindered some of our progress.

some personal issues came about, but together we brought them up, talked them over and found a compromise that everyone could agree upon.

The video

william created a compilation video of our robot. it includes it’s failures and successes.

the video is about 8 minutes long so sit back and enjoy the show.

FrankenBot in action

the end

any questions?