Color Maze NXT 2.0

Here's an updated version of my Color Maze NXT. I drew the maze and used color foam to give people the chance to move them around and tell the robot how to get through the maze.

I'm a member of a group called Wake Robotics that does a lot of outreaches to get people interested in engineering and science. I'm hoping to show this robot at an outreach and give people a chance to "program" the robot by placing the colors on the maze and telling the robot where to go.

Color Maze NXT

This was a difficult program to write, but very fun! I had been playing around with the idea of a music sequencer that I found at Damien Kee's website. (Go check out the video, then come back!) I didn't want to take my robot apart to build his sequencer (yet!) because I'm using it to practice programming. So I made the sequencer so that it would drive over the colors instead of rotating over them.  It didn't work as well as I hoped, so I was thinking about other things to do with the color sensing program.

I decided to make a course for it to use colors to find it's way from start to finish.  I wanted it to use blue to turn right and red to turn left.  I had trouble getting it to turn accurately though. My batteries were low and that made still more problems. I made turns more accurate by stopping before the turns and turning more slowly.  That helped a lot! -and now it's working great!!!

I am hoping to take the robot to our next outreach and let people draw red and blue squares to help the robot through a course. I think this will give people a basic idea of what it's like to write a program.

Here is video of my robot doing the color course:

Look I'm famous!!!

I'm really excited to be on this blog!!! 

I was so surprised to see myself on the front page of The NXT Step. I've been reading this blog and watching videos on it for a while and it is amazing what people can do with the NXT! One of my favorite videos was posted recently. It is of an amazing NXT lathe!

Santa bot

Santa bot was definitely my hardest NXT build so far. The arms were the hardest part.  I added a loop to the program so Santa bot would move forward, see somebody and open his basket. I put candy in the basket and when the person took candy out the SantaBot would say "HoHoHO Merry Christmas & Happy New Year" then he would back up and start over. I brought it to my family at Christmas and everyone enjoyed it a lot!I also brought it to the science fair to show everybody. I made a  YouTube video that shows how he works. 

I got the instructions to build it from an awesome blog called MP's NXT Universe. You can find the instructions to build your own under the NXT Robots category. He named it NXTolaus. Make sure you also check out the video of his NXT Gatling Gun! It is amazing.

FLL

I am part of an FLL team called cloud nine. Check out our website. It tells you all about what we have done.
We have competed in two competitions. At the first competition we won a trophy, then continued  to regionals,the second competition. Now we are goeng to the State competition, third level.

There are a couple of videos on YouTube of our NXT robot and attachments in action. I built the one way gate to retrieve the chair and the dog. It wasn't the best attachment because it wasn't all that accurate and pretty slow. It was still fun to build and I think one way gates are cool.

       
At the competition most teams have their own team button. one of my favorite parts of competition is to trade them.