project breif

Skittle Sorter Project

Final product

The link to my engineering notebook is attached to the "Final Product". The engineering notebook is basically a journal that we made in chronological order, from learning about the robot, to making a functional robot that can be driven by your phone. We made our learning journal by using the engineering design process. 

onshape

Onshape is a website that we used to create our different parts for our robots. For example in this project I used onshape to create my side part of my car, and the base of the car. Here in the photos you can see how I was stacking my designs on top of each other, to make sure that I would have my measurements correct, and so that when I would put everything together they wold align perfectly. 

Digital fabrication skills

code for robot

The code to my robot is located in the title, "Code For Robot." This is the code that I created to make my robot be controlled by my phone. A function is a piece of code that is there to do specifically, in this case I used it to make my robot go forward, backwards, left and right. An example of an if statement that we used were things like, “If button pressed.” This would tell us that if a button was pressed then the robot would know to move left, right, forward, and backwards.

Final video

The final video is attached to the title where it says, "Final Video." The video is showing a race that I had between my classmates.

my functionality 

Straight: My robot was able to go straight for the most part, but it would tend to drift a little bit off to another direction if one side would be heavier, and I think that the side of my robot was hitting the wheel while it was driving. To fix this problem in the future I will get the exact measurements that I need to make my robot function perfectly. Next time I will take into consideration the way I want to have my layout of my wires, pico, and other attachments, so that it doesn't interfere with my robot in a negative way. But other than that my robot would go really straight for the most part. 

Turning: When it came to turning my robot wasn't the best at it. I say this because when I was driving my robot I realized that it would have an extremely hard time to make a turn, and this was because my robot was too long for me to only have 2 servos. Next time I will make sure that I code multiple servos to help with the turning of my robot. 

reflection questions 

How has this project compared to other projects that you have done in your other classes?

I think that this project can't compare to my other projects that I've done in my other classes by, being more time consuming, and just a challenge in general. I say this because throughout this project we had to learn new things that we've never done, and we had to incorporate it with our robot. I think that the biggest challenge for me was coding because I've never done real coding before, but during the completion of this project, and learning how to use Mu better I started to understand coding. Another reason why I thought that this project was difficult was because I had to learn how to use different websites in more advanced ways, and using them to do more difficult things, and I felt that, that part of the project was just very time consuming. I also felt that I wasn't very patient during this project, because throughout this project I would have some difficulties, and it was on you to figure out what the difficulty was and solve it, for example my code or my wires wouldn't work sometimes and I would just get frustrated with the project. 

What would you change about your robot if you were to do this project again? 

Some things that I would change to my robot if I were to do this project again, is to change the measurements. I would want to change my measurements because when I was driving my robot my servo wan't able to turn because of how long the robot was. I never took the measurements into consideration on how only two servos were going to be able to turn the robot. To improve this moving forward I could just make the measurements smaller next time, or I could code more servos to help with the mobility of my robot. 

What is the top skill that you think you know well enough that you could teach others and why?

I think that the top skill that I would know well enough that I could teach others is that I could help with the actual creation of the robot. I think this is because I'm more of a hands on building type of person, so that's why I enjoyed creating the actual robot itself because it was more fun to me. I also learned many different ways, and techniques on Onshape that can help me create, and build new things in the future. 

final product of my robot