Day 1 Section 3

Included in your Transport kit bag

Included for all teams use


You can of course use any of the other stationary items from previous tasks.

Build transport. 

Problem synopsis

Transport is essential for exploration. You cannot be expected to walk everywhere? You now need to construct your vehicle. You need to consider the environment you are going to be driving in, there is no point in having a low body if there are rocks that need to be navigated over. 

Transporting a large, pre-built vehicle will be difficult, so the vehicle arrives flat-packed. That's a lot of empty space! So, it's up to you to build it.

Follow the below video from Admiral John in logistics on how to construct your buggy, and once the vehicle is made, we need to make it move. Below the video from Admiral John is another from Chief Engineer Colin giving you some clues on how to make it work. Watch and give it a go.

Before we progress though, lets think about the STEAM process.


STEAM process

In your journals follow and record your progress through the problem-solving process.

Analysis - What do you understand the problem to be? What are your success criteria? What are you working towards? In this instance, the outcome is pretty restricted, it's the successful completion of a robust vehicle that you can program to move

Design - The designs are fairly standard, however, the personalisation of the vehicle is up to you. Sketch out some ideas on how you could personalise your transport. What is it going to be? Take stock of the materials you have available to you. Make the chassis as cool as you want to!

Build - Make it! Test it! Record the outcomes, what happened? Is your vehicle solid?

Evaluation - Link back to your success criteria - did you succeed? If so, yeah! If not, what else could you have done? How could you improve the process on its next turn (iteration). 


What do you hand in to get your equipment?

Buggy .mp4

Before we launch into the coding, you need to open this site 

https://makecode.microbit.org/#editor

You need to then select Extensions

And paste the link below into the top of the screen. 

https://github.com/DFRobot/pxt-motor 

You then get the following. Select it and it should say downloading. 

A new menu item then appears. 

Open it, and you get a whole series of commands. I have my servos attached to S1 and S2, but you don't have to - attach them on any pins from S1 to S8.

Think about how your motors are attached. Is one upside down compared to the other. So what happens if you have the below code of

Forever, set Servo 1 to 0 and Servo 2 to 0.

So if one is upside down, and one is right way around, should we have them going in opposite directions? Try this.

What was that, you want all that in video form? Why, of course.......................

Me explaining the motor hat.mp4