Mission Assigned
We just finished the table robot, which you can read about in the last article, and we were being assigned our next mission. In this mission, we had to make our robot “obey” commands with a digital “remote”. I figured it wouldn’t be too hard, since we found a video on how to do it. We already made our robot, so we had that out of the way.
Day 1
One of my colleagues and I, started putting in the code we saw in the video, when I noticed that at the side of the block I was putting in, there was the name of one of the robots we could build. I has a feeling that this block was made specifically for M.V.P (the robot whose name I saw at the side of the block). I just put that idea out of my head, and kept going. We tried the video’s code, and guess what happened. Nothing! I wasn’t sure, but maybe my suspicions were right. I saw that the robot they used in the video was M.V.P. Although I still don’t know why it didn’t work, that’s still my top suspicion. Thankfully, my other colleague was able to get the robot to work with the remote. He was able to get it working differently from what the video had, but after a while, one of the commands stopped working.
Day 2
My colleague figured out we didn’t need a loop. We needed to make our own way. We all started making different programs and trying them out. The colleague that figured out we didn’t need a loop, was the same one who got us closer to being done. W e still needed to get the turning right, though.
Day 3
We ran into ANOTHER problem. We every time we tried to go straight, it went backwards. Every time we tried to go backward it went straight. And then we finally figured it out. We had to turn it the other way around. Programming can certainly have a lot of twists and turns! We started making Charlie, one of the Lego Mindstorms robots. We would then try out the remote with him.
Day 4
We completed Charlie, and we started to try our programs on him. We all used different types of digital remotes. We “created” different “remotes”. This is what the remotes look like
mine
Kalani’s
Michael’s
It was fun, frustrating, and tiring at the same time at least for me), but we learned a lot. Hopefully we can use these skills to start a successful career!