Wednesday, January 7, 2009

What I call the "Bumper Bug"

The continued building of the Lego Robot of Yesterday.

After the adding of the RCX unit and the trends for the Robot to be able to move.
Side view of up above.
The motors have been added, which allow the Robot to move.
This is the final product of several hours of searching for pieces and building the Robot.
The touch sensors are behind the yellow bars that are wrapping around the Robot. This allows the touch sensor to have a wider ability of sensing, since on the Lego block (underneath the black blocks with wires) have less than an inch for what gets pushed back into the block.


With following the Knudsen as a guide for how to build a robot, I have been impressed with the design of the Robot, since it is not how I would have gone about it. In the book, he brought me through building the robot and then programming it in the environment. Most likely I would have programmed the robot on how I wanted it to move and then built it to go with the program. It was also interesting to see how he had me reinforce the build of the robot to make it more sturdy.

Programming in the Lego Environment. I found that beginning to do the programming was a little bit difficult as I had to figure out how to put the commands together. The ability to drag and click allowed me to write the program quickly by following the example in the Knudsen's book.

While the Robot is built and the program has been written and saved, I have run into an error that I will have to go figure out what is going on. The problem: The IR transmitter can't be found. Which means that I can't get the program right now from the computer to the RCX. I will be researching it so I can continue and see the Robot Work. In trying to diagnose the problem, I have googled the error message and found some help, but the suggestions tried haven't made a difference yet.

Hours Worked So far today: 5 hours
Hours overall: 9 hours 30 minutes

1 comments:

Unknown said...

Does the computer recognize the IR transmitter? It seems like it was a serial connection.

Looks like you are making good progress. I will try to stop by the lab tomorrow or Friday while you are working.
-Dr. Lehman

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