February 16, 2017

Today, Spencer and Joe will try to finish the Barrier mission. They're adding in pandas and vet. Carter and Phil are going to work on the bee, pig, and poop. Cooper is finalizing his claw for Animal Conservation. Cody is writing this blog post. We will practice our skit and maybe Core Values today as well.

          Until next time, keep building!

February 15, 2016

We worked on the shark frame, which pushes the shark out to the area while we do the dog mission (time saver!). What we did is alter the pushing platform at an angle so the contraption would be forced against the west wall, and so the robot doesn't get caught as it turns away. We also created a differential (one larger wheel, then another) to help the contraption follow the west wall. For Animal Conservation. we changed our spinning stick to be split into two parts instead of only one, allowing it to grab easier and spin faster. We also played Kahoot! Joe won.

              Until next time, keep building!

January 31, 2017

To start practice today, we just did building mostly. But after everyone arrived and prep was finished, we played a Core Values game we made called Postal Service. There were 6 areas, each with items, a mailbox, and a safe zone. One person delivered an item to the mailbox of another, and the person there moved it to their safe zone. If they weren't there, it could be stolen from the box by the thieves. Then, we just went back to robot and building for the rest of practice. For example, Cooper tried to rebuild the shark brace so we could deliver the shark to the east rectangle to get extra points. The team is also building a long arm to deliver the bee and pig. Finally, Spencer is working on code to do the pandas.


                Until next time, keep building!

January 26, 2017 Update

We tried to do shark, but we couldn't get enough propulsion from our ramp without tipping the shark over.  We also played a kahoot to put some information into our heads that we need to know for the State Tournament.  We are also working on a basket that carries the bee into the hive.  This attachment is in production and has not been tried out yet.  It is still a prototype.


                   Until next time, keep building!

January 26, 2017

Today we are attempting to make a self-driving shark windup mechanism that will go to the east rectangle. We are putting the shark on the bottom of the tank by flipping it over, because that is legal and he is only touching the tank floor! We need more force to get him to bang into the wall, as we need to line up for the right box. We also did a quiz, and there are two developers working on more! We are going to do 3D printing with a teacher at this school so we can print models of our animal ramp (AmphibiRamp).

      Until next time, keep building!

The Jirachi Story

From December 1st, 2016

Let's say Jirachi wants to eat a berry, and finds one ten feet away.

Jirachi wants to go straight to the berry, but he is in a constant wobble the whole way, due to his proportional controller (which simply measures the object's error times a gain, and then corrects).

Jirachi needs a controller that will take the past, present, and future corrections, and adds them up to make on big correction. How can we do that?

Well, the answer is My Blocks! First off, we measure the error, which is our current gyro minus the wanted angle. Then, we take that times a gain (just a number we multiply by to slightly or massively change our correction.).

Then, we take the past correction, which is all of our past errors times one gain (usually small so we don't get a number that is 1000+). We need this to gauge where we are compared to where we need to be.

Finally, we need a future correction, which based on the gyro rate, slows the robot down a little or a lot. We need this to predict where we will be.

After we get those three, we add them together for our one correction! Then, we repeat 20 times a second!

After all of this, Jirachi should get his berry, and he will eat it and be happy!

Jirachi is owned by Nintendo™.

Until next time, keep building!

Cody W., Brickstormers

December 29, 2016

Our plan today was to fix up Animal Conservation and get our robot to the wall. We changed our plan of going straight from the fridge to the flamingo to hitting the wall and continuing from our old program. Our old program had us square up to a line, run into the wall, back up in front of the machine, attack the flamingo, and then go spin. To do this, we had to change some angles, and we made a new My Block that fixes the gyro when it is a few degrees off. Then, we went over to Biomimicry (the wall mission) for fixing. We also strike the fridge and go over the dog fence for extra points, which worked. Then we tried the cow, and it didn't really work. The bullet would shoot over the cow, or we would go away from the lever, or something silly like that. We also made a website, which you can check out at amphibiramp.com. We're planning to finish up our missions, project, and fix up our Core Values in the next week. Until next time, keep building!