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RoboPro: Subprograms and Meters

-A concise sentence or two that summarizes the activity

The recent activity that we had wanted us to create subprograms, specifically one that increases the value of a variable. Here are my reults:

-Screenshots of your program that show off the subprogram and metering

-What are the benefits of using subprograms within your team development projects? 

The benefits of these nice little subprograms is that it allows to provide more space to our main code, and create simple little functions that we can use a variable to define rather than recreate the entire code. That would suck. A LOT.

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Content Is King

Blogging: it has slowly found its way into our school system and is now being used to grade assignments in calss. All I can say (and i quote the Heavy): How did this happen? The internet has not only impacted my social life, it has now effected my school work.

Why u hatin'?
There are other things that I would preferably be blogging about rather than school work. What are these things? Absolutley nothing: I really don't like blogging at all. But if I had to choose a type of blog to run, it would be about he robotics club. It would help make events smoother throughout the year, provide updates on meeting dates, and also show our progress on the robot. I love robotics, and it be something fun to blog about and would also help out the team. It would also help spread the publicity of robotics, much like how blogs spread the popularity of People magazine throughtout the web.

What we should be doing...
I liked the build activities that we had last semester. They were fun, and provided plenty of hands on experience to do. Besides this, I also don't enjoy writing, its one of my weaker acidemic categories. The problem with the build projects is that nobody really participates, but I think these blog posts have increased participation, and gave us a very rude awakening.

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Machine Control: Project 3.1.7 Machine Control Design - Part I



Here is the first code that was made for the project. This was more of a speculation of what to use rather than "wtf am i doing?"





This second attempt at code worked out really nicely; it just didnt have the abilitty to stop the motor.





The final product! This code stops the motor when touched by a swithc, switches the direction and stops it with the potentiometer, and took forever to make!


1. Requirements: to design a vehicle that drives in a strait line back and forth to deliver batches of parts. Must travel back and forth based on input from a potentiometer. Must include an emergency shutoff in case the vehicle travels too far in either direction.

Components: Engineering kit tools and pieces

Constraints: must travel back and forth (2 ways); must have an emergency shutoff

2&3. Solutions/Sketches:

4. Final design:

5. Actual Design

The hardest part of this project (from my view, anyway) was making the code. It was quite a pain to figure out how to set up the motor to stop and reverse while going to forward. Overall, I found the final product to be very acceptable, and I feel that we met my expectations





















Peeps:
Mia: thanks for the blog posts and the image uploads!
Freddy: you did an awesome job! thanks for the help with the building and programming!
Me: you did well! we make good team!


Sorry about the text background, it wouldn't come off D:

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Activity 3.11 Inputs and Outputs

Answers

Digital Inputs
5. Unchecked and 0
6. Checked and 1
7. It reversed the conditions of pressing and not pressing the switch; so the switch was normally checked and at a value 1 while pressing it caused it to become unchecked with a value of 0

Analog Inputs
9. The potentiometer has a value range of 37 to 5000
11. 1321
12. 1267

Outputs
14. You can switch the wires so they are in the opposite jacks they were originally in.
15. As the reed switch is in contact with the magnet, it's value is considered open.
16. Normally closed
18. Light on = closed
19. More light = more resistance
20. Just reverse the programming
21. Leave it as it is normally

Conclusion
1. When the wires are in 1 and 3, it is always closed; when in 2 and 1, its always open.
2. It could be because measures the time in between the switch going on and off, and considers this measurement as the value for the analog ouput.
3. The heat on the NTC Resistor causes the particles to move faster, allowing them to pass into the resistor faster.

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Tennis Ball Game post

What was the challenge (list criteria and constraints)?

Recently (well, not really) we did a team based challenge inside of our second period engineering class. The challenge involved passing a tennis ball around as fast as possible, and everybody had to touch it. Simple enough, and the biggest problem that we had was finding a way to get everyone to the touch the ball before the other team finished.

What plan did your team come up with to solve the challenge?

Immediately, the team genius Austin, found a way to maximize ball touching and speed into one. His idea was to line up our hands as an inclined slope, rolling the ball down the slope, causing it to go at a decent speed and touch everyone's hands.

How did the execution of your plan work out?

This idea worked to the utmost perfection; we were able to beat the other team by a ridiculous amount of time. Of course, the second round we lost because the other team had seen our idea and improved it. There was much complaining and accusations going around, and there wasn't much we could do. So, for the final round, we improved our idea: simply drop the ball and brush our hands against it. It seemed like a winning strategy; it was not. The other team simply got everyone to touch the ball at once, and won the last round.

What would you do the same?

What would you do differently?

Honestly, I was happy with the results, and would not try to change anything and would keep all our ideas the same. The only thing that could need changing was the grade of the slop for our ramp (it could have been steeper).

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MKS (what does that stand for?)

l (distance) = m

t (time) = s

m (mass) = kg

a (area) = m squared

v (velocity) = m/second

(density) = m cubed

g (gravity) = m/second squared

F (force) = kg·m/s²

E (energy) = m² kg/s²
P (power) = m² kg/s³

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Survival at Sea

Intro: A brief summary of the activity.

The most recent activity we had in engineering was simple: determine from a list of items what you would bring in order to survive being stranded at sea. Seemed easy enough, so me and digmaster ended up coming with this order:

Personal Prioritization: List your prioritization of the items. Share your reasoning on your top 2 picks and your bottom choice. Were there any items you had a hard time choosing a ranking for?

1. a floating sea cushion
2. a shaving mirror
3. 20 square feet of opaque plastic sheeting
4. a 10 liter can of oil/petrol mixture
5. a 25 liter container of water
6. a fishing kit
7. a case of army rations
8. one bottle of 160 percent proof rum
9. a quantity of mosquito netting
10. 15 ft nylon rope

The logic of this list seemed pretty sound, and we had some good ideas on how to use each individual item. The floating sea cushion could be used as a flotation in case if someone (or yourself) went overboard the raft. The shaving mirror was a possible way to signal for help to nearby ships or over passing planes. The nylon rope, which we ranked the least important on our list of top 10, we kept because we saw potential to use it with the mosquito netting, which we could in turn use as a fishing net when the army rations ran out.

Team Prioritization: What priority did your team agree on? Talk about an item the group ranked similarly to you. What was something the group ranked far differently than you? What was something you and the group ranked similarly? How did your group work together?

 We felt pretty confident about our decisions, and felt that each item had a sound logical explanation of its order. Originally, we had the transistor radio on the list as number 1, but after some debating, we ditched it for the rope because the radio had only a short range and was one way. Digmaster and I generally agreed on most of the item placement, and didn't run into much resistance to each others ideas.

Expert Prioritization: How did your choices compare to the "official" Coastguard choices? Were there any big surprises between the two? What do you put more weight in, expert opinion or experiential data? Why?

When it came to unveiling the actual order the "experts" (a.k.a the Coast Guard ಠ_ಠ ) we were slightly surprised over the results. Where we saw the mosquito netting as a fish net, the Coast guard saw it as useless because there aren't any mosquitoes in the ocean. We were able to agree on the shaving mirror as being pretty important, but the seat cushion was apparently useless to them as an emergency life preserver. Overall, I feel that the expert opinion is based on linear thought; the Coast guard was not able to think outside of the box, and only saw the most common and present use.