December 31, 2017

Today, Cooper and Coach Steve built the silliest thing ever - an outhouse to go on the toilet to flip the lever! It's a hilarious idea, and it's effective on the toilet! Pretty soon, we're going to get a guy with a sweating face to put in there as if he was on the toilet! 🤣 Only problem is we can't figure out how to deliver it to the toilet. It's huge!

                                                                 Until next time, keep building!

December 18, 2017 - New SuperPUDS!

We didn't have practice today, but we did work on a new block - SuperPUDSTouch. It just uses the touch sensor to end SuperPUDS, our all-purpose driving block. You can find more on SuperPUDS here. In this case, it uses SuperPUDSVariable, which is the basic version that ends on a variable, with a wait to change the variable to true when the touch sensor makes contact with anything. This specific version of SuperPUDS is different from every other one, because it is built differently than all of the others, based around SPV instead of being a different ending.

We will likely end up changing all of our SuperPUDS blocks to be like this new one.

Why do we need this? For the Hulk mission run (which utilizes the claw), we need to hit a lot of things to know where to go. SuperPUDSTouch will help a lot to find the right position, because we'll know right when we hit the mission model or wall.

                                                                 Until next time, keep building!

December 12, 2017

The Brainiac Maniacs came to visit our practice today. We showed them our robot and the missions it could complete. We think they liked seeing how we've been able to combine missions into a single run, with simple driving. They really liked seeing our code and listening to our mission strategies.

How it sits with the new axles

How Mater is supposed to attach

We discovered one problem with the newest changes we made to She-Hulk. The new yellow axles interfere with its ability to open all the way, and then Mater won't fit on the arm correctly. We'll have to change the new axles.

After that, we had the Brainiac Maniacs play the Minefield game we had already set up for them. It's our favorite Core Values Challenge.

                                                                 Until next time, keep building!

Yellow Pipes and White Teeth

Max worked on picking up the yellow pipe today. The plan is to pick it up using axles that stick out of the front of the claw.

One of the biggest problems was making sure the arm was lifted to the correct height, so that the axles would go in the pipe's loop. But then we noticed that the claw could just slide up the ramp...so we wondered if we might not have to raise the arm at all. If it could slide up the ramp without getting stuck on the front, then the sticks would line up just right.

Max needed something to put on the outside of the claw, that was rounded enough to slide up the front edge of the ramp. Corrugated pipe, maybe? Or, Bionicle Teeth!

First, Max tried installing teeth by using Axle Pin 3s, but those let the teeth rotate, as seen in the above video. That might have worked, but then a second idea was to freeze the teeth in place by locking the axles with a thin beam 2.

                                                                 Until next time, keep building!

Wall Squaring Woes

In our original design plan, the EV3 Intelligent Brick ("Brain") itself was the back of the robot. This meant that we'd run the Brain's bottom edge into the wall if we wanted to square up.

The problem with this was that the sensor cables' clips touched the wall first. When the robot kept backing up, it unplugged its own cables!

So, we added some beams to be standoffs. They hit the wall first, to protect the clips.

The standoffs worked well during our Regional tournament, but none of our runs there actually used wall squaring. None of our programs had the robot back itself into a wall to square up to it. Once we tried adding such a run, we noticed a bad thing. It didn't work!

Those beams just got stuck on the wall. They would need to slide sideways on the wall for the robot to square itself, but they couldn't slide. So, we added some wheels, and that worked great! At least, for a while.

Our very first mission run (which doesn't do any wall squaring) flips the arm from the back of the robot to the front. When we tried this with the wheeled standoffs, we discovered a problem.

We needed to either move the wheels inward (we tried that, but then the robot wouldn't square up), or rebuild the arm. Yuck! But Soren thought maybe we could just rebuild the "easy side" of the arm, which is the side that doesn't have any gears. Soren actually did that in about 10 minutes, and then we had one standoff wheel out far enough to work.

So now, we can successfully wall-square, but only coming at the wall from one side. All of our run plans only need that one side, so we should be good to go!

Before

After

                                                                 Until next time, keep building!