Summer 2009 Mentor Workshop
From STEMRobotics
This is a review of what we did on a week by week basis.
Contents |
Week One - 9 June
We met and started with the reading materials Media:VEX for the Technically Challenged.pdf. We did the first chapter, the introduction. At the start of the second hour we used the Vex Quickstart Guide to build the tumbler bot. Most teams had two people on them, so the initial assembly went pretty fast.
Our mentors tonight were Charlie, Kelly, Sue, Scott, Jon, Matt, Shaik, Siri, Steve and Foster.
Week Two - 23 June
Due to vacations we were down to one builder for each robot. So we took most of the session to get them all up and running. The controller guide VEX 2008 Inventor's Guide Reference - Appendix D, Control Configurations (2.6M pdf, 06-27-08) has the correct documentation.
There were some minor problems, the robots were wired (and the control set up to do arcade). It took some time to break out the documentation and figure out the connection details to get them to do tank drive. But at this point we have 6 working Tumbler Bots.
- Arcade
- Motors go into 1,2,7,8 Jumper in pin 14
- Tank
- Motors go into 2,3,7,8 Jumper in pin 15
Next week we will race them to see who the better driver is, and to also change the wheels to show the difference in wheel sizes.
We added two new mentors, Gail and Ken.
 Mentors hard at work |
 Another view of the activity |
 Kelly and Foster download code |
 Ken writing code for his robot |
 Getting set to race |
 Steve writing code |
 Testing...and it works! |
 Another working robot |
Week Three - 30 June
We started off week Three with tumbler bot racing. Some pretty hard fought races, trying to remember right from left and front from back when the robot tumbles and goes the other way.
We then talked about how different wheel sizes and textures would change the configuration of the robot. Each team swapped out the 4" wheels for smaller, bigger, omni's and a set of tank treads. We then raced again to see what the changes were. Lastly we had a mini sumo pushing contest.
After sorting wheel configurations out, we talked about two, four, six, eight and tank configurations. Discussions about narrow and wide chassis on steering was next. To overcome that we talked about turnable car steering, to crab/swerve set up. Everyone got to drive an omni drive and talk about the controls to drive it.
Next week we will be talking about grippers and transforming the tumbler bots into pronto bots
(*)With a slight delay in our progress we are about a night behind in our general schedule.
Week Four - 7 July
We started working on the construction of our Protobots. Since the protobot is on the same square frame we made lots of good progress. Most groups completed their bases and are moving on to the Arm construction.
Next week we will start out on the lever and lifter section of the book.
