Category: education

We spent about 5 days using all of the knowledge that we acquired building our Vex robot to compete in the robot challenge on the last day. We had most of the core code done by Tuesday afternoon and were able to optimize on Wednesday and a little Thursday morning. The robot was very consistent and even with the air conditioner vent messing with the flame most of the time, it was about to find it’s way out of the maze, find the flame, move to it, blow it out and then give control to Norman to go and get the ball.I’m going to leave the code for the very end of this post because it’s pretty long.  Scroll down to the bottom to see the video of the robot going through the contest.

Here is the full front view of our robot.

Continue reading “Complete Mt. Sac Fire Sensing Vex Robot Challenge”

I was running out of time and get all the code done for the robot so I just incorporated this into the main robot code. Here is a picture of the Fan, Ultrasonic and IR Sensors installed on the robot.

Continue reading “Part 17 – Using IR Sensors for flame and line detection for the Vex”

Part  16 took the concepts we learned in some previous labs on the Arduino and had us try them with the Vex robot. The ultrasonic rangefinder is going to be one of the sensors we’ll need to accomplish the Vex project at the end of the class.

Continue reading “Part 16 – Ultrasonic Rangefinder and other sensors…”

Part 14 had us building a simple circuit to test for flame/heat/fire using a phototransistor. Before building the final phototransistor I put together a test using the breadboard. In addition to the breadboard test, I built a little IR emitter circuit that I would be able to use to test since I knew I was going to use this with my hack-a-toy. Here is my phototransistor test circuit. As well as the circuit reading working displaying values using the Arduino.

Continue reading “Part 14 – Building Sensors for your robot”

Part 13 was a variation of some of the work we had done in some of the previous labs. In this lab we got to use a good bit of pre-formatted code to test the operation of an Ultra Sonic or sound wave based sensor. The lab was just getting the sensor to work with some pre-created code. Here is the code I used to test …

Continue reading “Part 13 – Distance Sensing with Ultrasonic Sensor and Arduino”

For my Hack-A-Toy project I decided to overachieve a little bit knowing that we would be creating a robot to blow out a candle later in class. In my case I took one of a pair of old radio controled sumo’s that I wanted to get to move and find a heat source. Here is a picture of what the toy looked like before I started hacking.

Continue reading “Hack-A-Toy Fire Seeking Sumo Robot”

For me this was the missing piece to the platform, being able to do some kind of real-time debugging of values during execution. The Serial. library that comes with the Arduino allows you to interact with it while it’s running, which is great. Besides some of the Serial.print(ln) functions that I showed in quite a bit of the Lab 10 code, this lab work was really focused on getting input through the Serial interface. The code for this exercise is below…. Continue reading “Part 11 – Using the Serial Port”

Part 10 is where we learn to connect the hardware as both inputs and outputs using the code in the micro-controllers. This is the beginning of how to build bigger devices. The first part of Lab 10 is a primer on how to write some simple code to blink and LED connected to the Arduino. The Arduino setup looked like this….

Continue reading “Part 10 – Micro-controllers, input and output”

Here is the Star Wars game. You win by getting all rebel pilots, lose by getting all storm troopers but when you lose you get a 10,000 point bonus. I call this game Millenniums Win. Continue reading “Part 11b – Code.org Start Wars Game”

Part 9 allowed us to take what we learned in the previous labs and extend the simple on/off of the motor and direction to leveraging the how to work with different loads as well as analog outputs..

Part 8 had us using a relay, the transistor and resistor to control a simple motor in two directions. Here is what it looked like when it was working.

Continue reading “Part 8 – Bi-directional Motor Control”

In part 6 we learned about the device that helped users in the computer age, the transistor.

Continue reading “Part 6 – Transistor Switching”

Part 5 built on what we started in part 4 adding control of the output using switches and relays.  We started the lab by putting a simple switch into our LED configuration. Then we moved on to a more complicated 3 way switch setup, funny considering I had just installed 6 of these in my hope. It was awesome to understand how they worked.

Continue reading “Part 5 – Switches and Relays”

Part 4 is where we started to get into more complicated circuits. The first part of the lab laid out some of the notation used to communicate these circuits. First, we tested the circuit we built from part 3 with a different wiring, which didn’t work. Next we moved on to testing LED brightness using different resistors. Which one was brightest, the with the least resistance of course, the 100ohm.

Continue reading “Part 4 – Schematics, Ohm’s Law and Potentiometers”

Part 3 started with the basics of using a multimeter. This lab included usage that related to the project that we were doing including resistance, continuity and voltage measurements.  The lab started by setting the multimeter to the continuity selection and then testing the continuity of the board we were using in part 1.

Continue reading “Part 3 – Using a Multimeter”

This is the first post for my Mt. Sac class Electronics 10 Mechatronics. In this lab we got to play a bit with some of the basics of electronics. The lab is divided into two sections, learning how to solder (which I’ve done a lot of in the past, even though you can’t tell from the quality I exhibit below), and then applying that soldering technique to building the power supply I will use for the remainder of the class.

Continue reading “Part 1 – Intro to Soldering and Building Power Supply”