Week 4

After quite a few failed attempts we finally managed to get our line follower to follow the lines on the track, but at a slow pace of 1 minute. We solved this a little but raising the light response level to 40 which changed the nxt's time to 42 seconds -which was still very slow. After a lot more vain attempts we managed to narrow the time down to 31 seconds -still pretty slow.




(A picture of the track)
After timing and retiming, we decided to give one last shot and make our fastest program yet, but due to us being pressed by time we weren't able to try out the program.

Week 3

We began a major project -getting a nxt brick to follow a line- first we had to use lego to build the chassis for the brick and then the wheels and finally fit in the sensors, this was quite fun as we got to use lego and slightly relive our childhoods. But I digress we completed our nxt brick and it in the end -after many misplaced pieces (yes we used the nxt building manual)- the line follower was complete.




(A picture of the line follower)

We then began to start piecing together the program for the line follower -using a modified 2 step version of pilot 4- which we were not able to do successfully on our first few tries.

Week 2

We began to program our NXT brick and used basic programs to get a feel of what the NXT could be used to do. We started off with the preinstalled pilot programs on the robolab software that came with the NXT and then made slight variations of to them. At which point we were relatively used to understanding the NXT programs. After using the pilot programs we were told to create a program from a pilot program of our choice (1 or 2 or 3 or 4). We were told to create a program that caused motors to stop when pressed and when let go made the wheels spin in the completely opposite direction they were spinning in at the start and finally while the motors weren't functioning a lamp was supposed to turn on. This program was relatively simple to create as it combined all the elements of pilot 1,2,3 & 4. We set up our program as shown below:

After successfully making our program we promptly proceeded to begin line following but never got round to finishing it during the lesson. So we left it for next week instead.

NXT bricks week 1

Week 1 (November 6th 2012)

We were introduced to the widely used NXT device and taught all about operating the UI side as well as the hardware side of it. We also found out that thanks to the compleity of the device we were able to conect it to 3 output devices and 4 input devices as well as a usb cable (and, if we wanted to, use a bluetooth device to connect to it).
The NXT was made up of 1 core brick (as shown below) and
seemed simple to use. As for programming and configuring it we found out we could use the programming language of python (which we had learnt earlier this term) or even another language called Visual C#.

Finally we labled a picture of the NXT brick and set off to create this blog.

(An example of what the brick is capable of)