Complete Mt. Sac Fire Sensing Vex Robot Challenge

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.

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Part 14 – Building Sensors for your robot

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.

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Part 13 – Distance Sensing with Ultrasonic Sensor and Arduino

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 …

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Part 11 – Using the Serial Port

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 7–Introduction to Micro-controllers

Part 7 was our first try at connecting our hardware circuit with the software based Arduino controller. The lab began with a short explanation of the Arduino and then moved right into building the first controller. The lab itself was pretty simple as all we were required to do is wire up an LED to the Arduino. I took it a little further and decided to control a few LED’s.

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Part 4 – Schematics, Ohm’s Law and Potentiometers

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.

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Part 1 – Intro to Soldering and Building Power Supply

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.

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