Subject:
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Robothon Recap - Welcome to SMART
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.org.us.smart
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Date:
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Tue, 11 Oct 2005 15:07:36 GMT
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Viewed:
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3189 times
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We had a very busy and exciting weekend at Robothon 2005. SMART had two tables
where we demonstrated some of our robots and showed a video of our the last
Crate Contraption that David, Mark, and I put together. Our table was manned by
Brad, David, and myself. Thank you Brad and David for all the time you put in
to help man the SMART table. Next year I hope we have a few more people to help
hold the fort so that we all have more time to spend looking at the other
interesting exhibits and competitions.
We had a very enthusiastic audience at the SMART tables with a lot of people
interested in what we've been working on. I expect to see a lot of new faces at
our next meeting. For all the new folks who came by and checking out our little
section here on LUGNET for the first time, Welcome! I have added a little list
of resources at the bottom of this mail for the new folks.
It would have been nice to have had an actual crate contraption up and running
but this year we didn't have the time to put something like that together. One
reason why I didn't have the time is because I spent so much time trying to get
a robot ready for the Line Maze competition. This is an event I have entered
and won in the past but this year I was not so fortunate. In prior years when I
competed there were no loops in the maze. Which meant that the robot only
needed to learn the one possible path that would lead from the start to the
finish. With loops the robot needed to accurately keep track of the location of
the intersections and the distance of the paths so that it could choose the
shortest path to the finish. For a LEGO robot, this added two main challenges.
First of all, since one input had to be a rotation sensor to measure distance, I
only had two light sensors to track the line, detect intersections, and detect
dead ends (the line just ended). The second challenge is the memory available
to the RCX program. Since the robot needed to find the shortest path, it had to
store information about the maze as it explored the maze.
Anyway, my robot suffered from line tracking reliability problems. It did okay
for most of the first of three runs and managed to get about 3/4 of the way to
the finish. On the second and third runs it did much worse and ended up getting
lost shortly after it started. Oh well. Next year!
Doug Bell entered a LEGO robot in the walking race and came third!
Congratulations Doug!
Resources for new people interested in Mindstorms:
Where to buy:
Mindstorms sets can be bought online from http://shop.lego.com/. You can also
go to the Lego store in Bellevue square. If you want to save some money you may
be lucky with www.ebay.com or www.craigslist.com.
Books on LEGO robotics:
There are several good books out there on building Mindstorms robots. Look for
books by Dave Baum or the Ferrari brothers. I suggest checking out the local
library systems. Go to www.spl.org or www.kcls.org and search for mindstorms.
There is also an excellent online book that I highly recommend:
www.hightechkids.org/download.php?file=BLRforFLL-Version1.3.pdf
Programming:
Most of who come to SMART meetings use NQC to program their LEGO robots. NQC is
a c-like programming language originally written and designed by Dave Baum.
Currently NQC is maintained by John Hansen who has also created an excellent
development environment called Bricx Command Center (BricxCC). Downloading the
latest BrixCC will also install the latest NQC compiler so if you have a PC
installing should be easy and trouble free. Download BricxCC with NQC from:
http://bricxcc.sourceforge.net/
More questions, feel free to email me, GustavJ elephant-trunk-a msn.com. Or
better yet, come to the next SMART meeting!
Gus Jansson
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Message has 2 Replies:
 | | Re: Robothon Recap - Welcome to SMART
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| (...) I'm kind of kicking myself for taking my robot to NorthWest BrickCon, which while it obviously had far far more Lego than Robothon, didn't have the emphasis on robotics of Robothon. I only found out after the events that Robothon was taking (...) (19 years ago, 11-Oct-05, to lugnet.org.us.smart)
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