November Blog post pt. 2

Robot Update and More

This November has been a great month for robotics. The class has worked on a wide variety of things such as addition of a distance sensor and also a motion sensor to the robot. This month we have also worked on projects other than the robot such as fixing a drone and experimenting with motors. The distance sensor we added to the robot was very cool and definitely could be a major part of the robot. However because we wanted the robot to be able to be remote controlled we didn't allow the distance sensor to modify the way that the robot was moving. Other groups did let the robot modify its behavior by making it stop and turn whenever it got too close to an obstacle or something similar to that. The only thing that we let the distance sensor do however was to give us the distance that it was from an object in millimeters. This was a good way to utilize the distance sensor without having to compromise our goal of total control by remote. The motion sensor would also have been cool but it was much too sensitive and didn't really have a plausible use on a robot. Our group also had the time to take a drone that my partner had broken and fix it. One of the motors on the drone was broken and we had to unsolder that motor and solder on a new one for it to be able to work. Fixing something in a mechanical way is always satisfying and it was a good experience putting robotics skill to use in the real world. This month was a very productive month of playing around with electronics to get a feel for what the limits and abilities are in the field of robotics.

Code Snippets

//distance sensor function
int distanceFunction(){
  int distance = 0;
  
  digitalWrite(trigPin,LOW);
  delayMicroseconds(2);
  digitalWrite(trigPin,HIGH);
  delayMicroseconds(10);
  digitalWrite(trigPin,LOW);
  
  distance = pulseIn(echoPin,HIGH);
  
  Serial.println(distance);
  
  return(distance);

}

Future
In the future what we have done in this month will give me and my group a better understanding of robotics. Much of this course is tinkering until you figure stuff out, or make something cool. As this is an essential part of learning how everything works, it is very important not to forget to relax and mess around with some parts to advance your knowledge. Robotics is a great thing to know and messing around with it helps a lot to be great and times when you can't just mess around.