Team Challenge: Circuit Race

The "Circuit Race" experience was great as we applied our knowledge from past activities - a true test of our knowledge. Although the task seemed easy, it wasn't, as it was actually a very tedious task. We had to obtain certain pieces of information before we could start programming and the program was really long - ironic as the course is just a square, yet there's so much to do with the robot; also, we had to modify our current task-bot in order to get it to make turns and move forward the way we wanted it to - we had some minor problems with the wheels as it caused our robot to stray from the course. All-in-all the experience proved what we can do as "amateur programmers".. not to mention the competitive experience as well..

Anyways, here are some images of the program that i used in the circuit race...







And here are some our pics of our task-bot... (note: we used the smallest wheels from the kit.. the picture was taken before the circuit challenge -- the wheels in the picture are the biggest from the kit)

"Hello World, My Name is... "

Reading chapter 3, seemed rather ironic (time-wise) due to the fact that we have already started programming. However, given a task, i have to stay on task... In chapter three which is in direct reference to our activity "hello my name is...", it briefly explains how to program (haha, design**).

The purpose of applying such designs to the nxt , in my opinion, is to notify/warn us of what type of program is running or subtle changes/errors. Programming the design on to the nxt is in great contrast to programming motion, as its much more simple and only two icons need to be used - display icon, and one wait icon. In practical sense, display blocks can give an edge to the robot's design while notifying us of what has been done and what has yet to come.

In the future, i will apply display and sound blocks to programs in order for me to know what my robot's actions are.

e.g.

Display Sleep - Wait for sound/clap - Display Surprise - Move forward (c) - Move forward (b) - Rotations - Stop (c) - Stop (b) - Sound (applause)

At the end of the chapter they give off an additional piece of information - i believe almost all icons have a pull-down box called a data-hub. The data-hub will come in great use for future projects/programming (advanced).

Data-Hub: allows you to draw data wires from one block to another using data plugs.