Student Name: Jerico M.
Objective: The time has come, this week we needed to get a time for the race to the wall in order to get in a high spot on the leader board.
Procedure: We were in a rush this week because we needed to build our robot and connect everything up as planned. Time was of the essence so we just did exactly what the robot model looked like from the image in the previous blog. It only took us under less than an hour to complete the robot, we had everything connected through the chassis and it was perfect. For our chassis we had a dent in the middle so that there was space for the wires and for the motors. We had the switch at the front and a bit of wood on it to improve the surface area in order to activate the switch, the motors were then held in place with a lot of tape. The battery pack was placed first on the chassis and connected with super glue and electrical tape with the breadboard on top also connected with tape. The wires may seem a bit sloppy but this was because we had to keep disassembling the robot over and over again.
Now, I know what you’re thinking, it doesn’t look as appealing but as long as it gets the job done is all that mattered at this point. We tried to get it running first but nothing was happening! We were supplying the motors with 6V but the motors wouldn’t seem to run properly. The wheels only moved when the robot was lifted from the ground. Another thing we noticed was that the robot was skipping one of our states involving the switch. For some reason the sensor state occurred first which made our robot stop when seeing black instead of the switch state where the robot would go in reverse when pressed. We had to disassemble the whole thing which was a pain in order to identify the source of our problems.
We actually stayed back for five extra hours and finally solved the problems! The first thing we realized was that there was a lot of friction between the gears, in the picture above we had a bigger gear moving the gears of the two wheels. We removed that gear and moved the motors to each set of wheels instead to remove this friction. This didn’t solve the problem and so we decided to use 9V and our robot finally moved! We were so happy with this but it was too late as we didn’t have to necessary equipment to record our time and our lecturer was already gone. We also rechecked our code and found out that there was an extra “=” sign which made our code to skip the state involving the switch.
Conclusion: Overall this week, even though we didn’t get a time, I think it was still a successful week for us. We’ve figured out all of our problems meaning that we will definitely be able to get a time next week. It was also nice that our whole group stayed back until our problems were solved, this shows the dedication and team-work each member of our group is willing to contribute.
Jerico Engineering Blogs 