3R's-Reprogrammed and Rebuilt Robot

1 more day till demonstration day and we were still unsure about the robot.but when everyone came we all had it in our minds that we got to at least do 1 drawing by today. Determined to finish this we started our robot and worked perfectly, we tried to connect the sound and it did work but then was too much in a hurry to think about another sensor so we took it off and took of the programming for it.

We then added Glow sticks to the robot and use blue tack to put the led lights on the robot which looked like this.
We then tried a trial run of the led laser lights and it worked perfectly with the right adjustments on the camera we got it to work and it looked like this on our trial. Straight after we took our first drawing which was light graffiti. So we have done the first drawing for our robot. Everything was working perfectly and how it's suppose to work so we decided to do everything today, After light graffiti we started preparing for the next one which was drink satchets and water. it also went well only minor trouble like the robot getting stuck on the board( it wasn't even) we then fixed it all up and got this picture. our 2nd picture done!
Now on to the last which was the dabber painting. We used Highlighter colours which were Green and Orange. We took of the bristles from the tube and added a slight wet tissue and added paint and from there attached it to the arms and then we let it do its thing on the paper and it turned out like this.
So Finally we done 3 images all different from one another and it all worked perfectly. Lets hope the demonstration works well.

Prototypes/Finished Robot

So Wednesday came and we were of with our robot building while the others made parts for the drawing parts. We got the cogs working properly and the sweeper was partly done.
Next part was getting the water spinners at the top to work properly. Which took a bit but we got it to work out. So towards the end the robot looked like this.
But it towards the end it didn't end up like this we had minor difficulties and due to that we had to rebuild everything again into another robot and strengthen it's parts, so during the day it was changed completely and programmed it so that the sensors would pick up objects in the way. The new robot looked like this, but the complications of the parts being to weak was still an issue and after the whole day of working on this robot it was completely changed over night and reprogrammed and fixed the issues of the sweeper. and strengthened the parts that needed to be. The final Prototype after going through 2 robots was this.

Project Drawing Robot

We started of this project by doing each individual their own ideas and drawings of how it will work and the next day put them together and decide which ones would look great and make it different from the rest. We chose on 7 ideas and from there we saw how it will work out and if it is a good idea to do them. From there we cut it down to 4 which was Paint Sweeper, Glow in the Dark Paint, Spinning Pen Dabber and Light Graffiti.

From there we went off to find our equipment and tried to find those 4 ideas if it could work.
We picked out the glow in the dark paint first, We couldn't find it anywhere so we just made it ordinary paint but highlighter colours and we also put the dabber and idea with this because it's just the same idea but put together as one. The next idea was Paint sweeper, that was easy to find because any ordinary paint brush will do, the next idea was light graffiti, any led laser light will work for this so we tried to find the cheapest led light. The last idea sort of changed while we were searching for it which was paint dabbers, we instead thought of ideas on the way, which was using sand and the sweeper to sweep the sand away and make a shape, others had ideas like using fire which could work but the parts might melt or burn so we decided not to. We then thought of other ways of using sand like black sand will work with magnets, we tried using that idea, while trying to find magnets and thinking if its the last perfect idea we then thought about drink satchets instead and water getting flicked onto the paper covered drink satchets. i thought it worked well with how we are going to be different from the other groups, using food as art. As we got back it was a bit late so we called it in and start fresh tomorrow with our ideas and our equipment for the robot.

The Beginning of Transformers/Robot

9am start on a Monday morning! awesome time to start the second week off. It was a good lecture,just hearing about what the next lecture would be and getting our next assignment which is a 8 events blog(shouldn't be that hard to do ha ha).

next four days was about going in groups and designing a chess piece which turned out to be the start of robot making which is pretty awesome!!. So Myself, Jack and Robin made a name and a piece which was called the hunter. It goes a little something like this, the hunter can attack two steps in front of it, it cant move backwards and if there are no piece in a radius of 1 square around the piece its attacking, it has to move to it's spot and takes the piece. The next thing was making the picture for it,which we done but i don't have a camera at the time so i couldn't take a picture..

After a 1.5 hours we had to go back for the briefing of the robot making/getting the NXT Robots then the real fun begins. we had to show the movement of our chess piece via the robot.which was OK to do with our robot because as a hunter it always looks around itself so we put that feature in it. The very next day it was like show and tell everyone puts their robots in a box and whoever gets the furthest without getting stuck wins! we came 2ND on the 2ND round which was pretty good considering ours went back and forth and everyone Else's got stuck!! yay for us!

after that show he gave us another brief which was we had to get the robot to move past the moving doors and into the lecturer's room and knock on the door or ask a question to Pat. At the start our robot was doing fine but then the sensors started getting faulty and decided to just program it. the next day we done trials it worked pretty well but then when it was show time it went faulty and ran behind the door(Silly Robot).

Thursday Done!

Wow what a busy day today first the presentation, which by the way went well the only thing was we forgot it was visualising and not making the data look obvious with what we were collecting. So that was a lesson learned for us, read the brief properly next time ha ha.

Anyway on to the next thing we done which was about following what the cards told us to do and video everything. It was pretty fun but kinda weird cause people were watching us and probably going, " what are these guys recording". But anyway some of the cards were tricky like following a girl in red and the tattooed guy because of the walking around the video was shaky, like really shaky hard to watch.

OK so we filmed everything and now putting it all on the computer. That was kinda hard there was so much videos from other people, when we found it all then time for editing, we picked a good song for this project. which u will see on the video. Overall a pretty fun day.

First days

First couple of days at uni was not so bad. A few things I heard from the lecturers on Monday was good. Exciting! Makes you think of ideas already. James began with his talk about what's happening over the next couple days and the first thing in my head;'ARE YOU SERIOUS!!' Projects already! 1 days projects are even worse! oh no!!..nah it should be all good.

So Tuesday came up, we done our first task of BCT and i actually thought it was good, just doing the whole social networking with a piece of rope and pins not bad you could see people are linked in some way. Then he made us do our own maps which was OK. The fact that we couldn't install the program was lame but a a couple minutes later it was installed and up and running and then at that point just didn't feel like doing the project so waited till i got home to do it.

Next day. Wednesday, wow!! quickest 30min of the day. In a hurry to print off the map, lucky for me mine was already pdf and only had to pay 1 dollar extra yay for pdf files haha something i learnt from Graphic Design yay!! So anyway we put up our maps on the walls and James asked to talk about which one was good and why it caught your eye etc etc. When he came over he asked which one was good. Not a great idea to say to him it looks mean! haha especially the first one talking. I thought the design of it was eye catching cause of the way the nodes were placed but overall it was hard to read the Data and the design overwhelmed the data which we were trying to show. Anyway we chose which one was good and why and now i think James is gonna blow it up into an A0 size paper. That should be good. OK next part of the day choosing 2 other people to join you to make up your own data. Should be good lucky it didn't rain. So when we collected data we saw a pigeon with one of the foot cut off!!haha it looked funny anyway off topic. So we put everything together and made up our visualisation of the data we collected. I hope it goes well on the presentations. I hate them!! oh well next day!!