Month: January 2019

On Friday 25 January 22 robot teams from six schools gathered at the Forwood Elementary School Cafeteria. We set up four fields for this event to give each team 9 matches of play.

Teams played 99 qualification matches and ate over 18 pizzas.

The Forwood Sharks were on top of the heap, followed closely by the Carrcroft Slithering Snakes at. Maple Lane’s Shadow Knights continued from last week’s event showing off their hanging skills. In the table below you can see how close the top 6 teams were.

Ranking	Team Name	Average Score
1	Forwood Sharks	10.14
2	Carrcroft Slitherig Snakes	9.86
3	Maple Lane Shadow Knights	9.71
4	Lombardy Telsa	9.43
5	Hanby Beetle	9.0
6	Lombardy Google	9.0

After the finals run it was the Lombardy Mac and Lombardy Amazon teams coming from way behind as the 9th and 10th ranked teams taking the event with a 12 point score!

Second place went to the Hanby Beetles and Lombardy Google with a score of 9.

The build award went to the Hanby Hornets for their amazing design with the four bar linkage.

Judges award was to the Carrcroft Slithering Snakes for their very interesting design that let them quickly knock the Bonus Hubs off

For their first outing the Lonbardy teams had a great day with all four teams placing in the top 10. The Harlan Ravens made a great showing at 12th place. They had finished their robot a week ago and came in to the event with just a few minutes of drive time.

Thanks to Melissa Miller and the Forwood staff for holding such a great event. Thanks for all the parents that helped out during the event. Special thanks to Alyssia and Will for score-keeping and Jason (a Brandywine School Board member) for keeping the matches flowing. Thanks to Warren for helping out teams that were having build issues.

Thanks to STEM Robotics: Steve and Foster for producing the event.

See you at the next event on Saturday 2 February at the Rt 9 Library and Innovation Center for “Innobots 2019”

One of the hardest things to do to create an autonomous routine is capturing the moves. Most of the time it’s trial and error creating an outline of the code and filling in distances and degree turns. You can measure distances to help, but the turns are a problem. Along with lifting arms in the right locations.

This process was developed by Turbodog and announced on the the VEXIQ forum. The setup gives you the ability to make 1″ moves forward and backwards and to turn 5 or 10 degrees to the right and left. By keeping track of the moves, you can piece together the full routine.

This method assumes that you are using the Modkit setup either on a PC or iPad

You need to configure your robot, in the example assume the drive base and two motors lifting the arm.

1) Change the drive train settings for your wheel types, track width (how far apart the wheels are side to side) and the wheelbase (how far apart are the wheels from front to back)

2) In the brain section you are going to write

when Start
do forever
clearLCD
newline
print “Left/right motor degree”
print (armleft) rotation in (deg)
print ( ) // this is a few space characters to space the numbers out
print (armleft) rotation in (deg)
end forever

3) In the controller blocks you want to put a series of these:

when controller-button-E up-pressed
broadcast forward1

when controller-button-E down-pressed
broadcast backward1

when controller-button-L up-pressed
broadcast left10

when controller-button-L down-pressed
broadcast left5

when controller-button-R up-pressed
broadcast right10

when controller-button-R down-pressed
broadcast right5

when controller-button-F up-pressed
broadcast armup

when controller-button-F down-pressed
broadcast armdown

when controller-button-F up-released
broadcast armstop

when controller-button-F down-released
broadcast armstop

 

4) And then in the motor for the arm you need to add

when start
set holding to on
set velocity to 50%

when armup
spin FWD

when armdown
spin REV

when armstop
stop

 

5) finally in the drive base motors

when start
set drive speed to 50%
set turn speed to 50%

when forward1
drive FWD 1 in

when backward1
drive REV 1 in

when left5
turn LEFT 5 deg

when left10
turn LEFT 10 deg

when right5
turn RIGHT 5 deg

when right10
turn RIGHT 10 deg

when drivestop
stop

You can now run the robot, single steps at a time to move forward, backwards, turn left and right. As you position the arm you can read the angles off of the display on the back. You need to remember as you start each run to make sure the arm is in the same starting position.

When you convert to the final routine you can add things together. So you can move 8″ vs making eight 1″ movements.

Link to a video tutorial

Good luck!!

Nine current teams and a few groups that are interested in VEX robotics came to the first Annual Delaware Technical and Community College Winter Workshop on 19 January at the Dover “Terry” Campus.

Jim Crane from RECF did an overview of VEX Competition robotics. He then went into a in-dept look at the 2018/19 VRC game “Turning Point”. Existing teams then split off to polish programs and make last minute hardware tweeks in preparation for some matches.

The other roboteers got an introduction to VEX parts, then played a round of “freeze tag” with robots. Each robot has a button on the front and back, when touched, the robot freezes. When touched again they start back up and can try to go and freeze another robot.

Jillian Whitney, the host for the event, ran scrimmages for the teams. The scrimmage was in a “grab and go” format, as teams are ready to drive they grab their robot and go get in the queue for the next match. 14 matches were played. High score for the day was 26. A number of teams had viable autonomous routines.

Just before lunch, Foster Schucker from STEM Robotics gave an overview on what STEM Robotics does and how Delmarvarobotics is set up.

The award for “Most Matches Played” went to a team from Reading Middle School, they played in all but one of the matches. Even with all those matches, they were able to make minor repairs and even do a wheel upgrade.